


The Springtime Cup

by StormySteady



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Angst and Humor, F/M, Friendship, Games, M/M, Slow Build, drunken sexscapades, pretty much just Aomine and Kagami bickering over nothing while Momoi stresses out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-04 23:24:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1797157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StormySteady/pseuds/StormySteady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aomine and Kagami are both in love with Kuroko. Instead of handling these feelings like reasonable human beings, they design an elaborate competition to decide who can confess to him first.</p><p>Meanwhile, Momoi and Kuroko are off playing their own games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rainbow Kitten and Friends Warehouse Escape 2

Chapter 1: Rainbow Kitten and Friends Warehouse Escape 2

 

"God _damn_ it, Satsuki!" Aomine yelled. He gripped the game controller as if trying to crush it into a heap of plastic and fine particulate, and for a moment he even considered hurling it at the TV. Maybe that would make him feel better about things. Or maybe it would just make a mess of his living room that he was really in no physical state to clean up right then. In the end, he sighed and refrained. "Why do you have to cheat so much?"

"Dai-chan! Just because a person can beat you doesn't mean that they're cheating. Don't you think it's possible that you could just suck?"

Aomine just gripped the controller harder, this time pretending that he was wringing Momoi's stupid smug neck. He wasn't sure how a neck could be smug, come to think of it. But with his childhood friend, he supposed anything was possible. 

"But it's... it's... goddammit Satsuki, it is Rainbow Kitten and Friends Candy Warehouse Escape 2. It is a game targeted for five year old girls. There is no way that I can lose to someone like you in a game this stupid."

"Don't underestimate the Rainbow Kitten franchise, Dai-chan. It requires a whole lot of strategy to play it at my level."

Aomine had fallen in battle, but Momoi was still going strong- her voice, though perky as usual, sounded a little distracted as she responded to him. Aomine's hands had finally started to cramp, and he tossed his controller over to one side of the couch. But he continued to seethe in silence. Watching her colorful little avatar dash around the screen in search of loot and powerups did nothing to dull Aomine's rage. 

"What strategy? It's a simple game with an obvious goal- you just get to the exit each level before the room fills up with candy and smothers you to death. Like I said, it is a game that literally a three year old could understand."

"And that's your problem. You just run to the exit each time, and ignore anything else that's going on, and then get confused when you don't have enough points to pass through the door. Ooh, marshmallow!"

"What's marshmallow do?" Aomine wondered, speaking during the split-second interval before he remembered that he was angry.

"Just wait and see." Momoi swerved sideways, navigated a course of obstacles, and then finally managed to bump her champion of choice, Sparkle Raccoon, into the shimmering pastel square. An animation of Sparkle Raccoon taking a big bite of the sugary confection exploded across the screen, followed by a flash of light and a little yellow bar on the side of the screen filling to full capacity. 

"It fills up your friendship bar!”

“Marshmallows and friendship have nothing to do with each other. This game gets stupider by the minute.”

Momoi made a show of pretending to pout. “Well if you’re going to be like that, I won’t bother reviving you then. That’s what the friendship bar does.” 

“Do whatever you want. I don’t care.” Aomine yawned, perhaps a bit louder than he would have had no audience been present, and stretched out his limbs. Instantly he regretted this as pain jolted through his lower right calf. He tried to grit his teeth but couldn’t prevent a grunt of discomfort from spilling out. 

"Dai-chan! Are you okay? What happened?" Aomine wanted to growl in frustration as Momoi looked over at him, worry apparent in her pink eyes. 

"Everything's fine! Jeez, Satsuki, just keep your eyes on the game." 

"The doctor said not to put any stress on your leg. He said to keep it as still as you can for at least a month, and even after that not to play basketball until it was completely healed."

"No, he said I'd be fine in a week." Aomine waved a hand. “Stop overreacting.”

"Well, that's what you told me. But then I gathered some data."

"You can't trust the internet in these kinds of things. My sprain wasn't as bad as a lot of them are."

"That's not what Dr. Nakamura's electronic medical record says."

Aomine creased his brow. Could his friend really have become a hacker without him noticing it? This was maybe taking her obsession with obtaining all possible stats on her acquaintances a little too far... "You didn't, Satsuki." 

And of course, she just smiled that little closed-eyed smile of hers. 

Aomine sighed, deciding that maybe he didn't want to know. "Look, there's a bubblegum Satsuki. Make sure you get that."

"Nah, I want to get the chocolate."

"That's too far out of the way. It'd be a waste of- or okay, just go ahead and do what you want."

Momoi blew him a kiss. "Make sure you let me know when you want Rainbow Kitten-chan to be revived."

"Like I'd ever want that demon from hell to be revived," he shot back. And, with a huff, he slumped down on the couch, making sure that his leg was supported on the fluffy pink pillow that Momoi had brought him, and picked up a basketball magazine. 

Of course, it was an issue that he had read through at least twice and not found particularly interesting even the first time, and so Aomine couldn't say that he was disappointed when a knock came at the door. Anything to break the monotony that had been following him around since the injury.

"I'll get it," he said as Momoi paused her game. 

"You'll stay on the couch where invalids belong," she replied. "Do you know who it is?" 

"Dunno. Hopefully it's pizza."

"Did you order any?"

Aomine shook his head, and Momoi sighed. Muttering something about how there was no cure for idiots like him, she marched over to the door. 

Aomine had a weird, twisty apartment, so he couldn't see the entrance from where he was sitting. However, it didn't take a genius to figure out who the new arrivals must be. 

"Testu-kuuuuun!" came the rapturous squeal, followed by the distinct sound of two bodies dropping to the floor. Or rather, he speculated, the sound of one body pushing the other to the floor through the forced of crazed overenthusiastic hugging alone. 

"And Kagamin too! We didn't know the two of you were coming over."

"It's not like we were planning to," came Kagami's distinct rumble of a voice. Aomine groaned and looked over at his propped-up leg with despair. Like hell he'd let Bakagami see him in his current state.

"Stop having conversations in people's doorways!” he shouted. “Do you want to make my neighbors hate you? Tetsu, you can come in if you want. Kagami, get the fuck out of my apartment."

"Dai-chan is so rude!" Momoi said with a laugh. "Come in, both of you. We were just hanging out, you can join us."

"Hanging out is what friends do. Bakagami is not my friend."

"This is exactly why you _don't_ have any friends, Dai-chan," Momoi giggled. "Come on in, guys."

The sound of footsteps on the laminate floor knocked Aomine back into his senses, and in a flash the pink pillow was gone, that embarrassing video game was turned off, and the wrapping around his ankle and calf was firmly covered by the leg of Aomine's sweatpants. Maybe he had to let Kagami into his house, but he didn't have to let him know everything. 

Momoi led the two former Seirin players into the living area, still glommed onto Kuroko's arm like some of kind of extra-adhesive anemone. Aomine felt the usual twist of loss and want and other emotions that he didn't really want to explore at that moment in his abdomen when looking at his erstwhile teammate, but, also as usual, he brushed them away with barely a second thought. He'd given up Kuroko as a lost cause years ago. Even with the help of his trusty wingman Momoi, who had gone into deep cover as a Kuroko fangirl to try to make him open up a little bit more about his emotions, he had yet to see Kuroko express a love for anything other than basketball, vanilla milkshakes, and that scruffy mutt of his. It made Aomine feel a little better to know that even though he didn't stand a chance with Kuroko, nobody else did either.  

Kagami brought up the rear of their little parade, dredging up a mess of emotions that, compared to what Aomine felt when he looked at Kuroko, couldn't be said to be more opposite. Kuroko made him feel like moping around like some kind of lovestruck schoolgirl, like drinking his feelings and saying embarrassing things and maybe even trying his hand at poetry. Kagami just made him feel like dragging the red-haired teen down to the basketball court and wiping the floor with him.

Thinking about basketball made his injured calf twitch. Aomine sagely decided to focus on something else. 

"So, what the hell are you two doing here? I don't remember telling you my new address." He glared at Momoi, making it clear where he thought that this intelligence breach had originated from. 

She just pouted and squeezed Kuroko's arm tighter. "Don't look at me like that, Dai-chan. I didn't tell them anything."

"Momoi-san is right. Kagami-kun and I didn't have any idea that you lived in this apartment complex until we happened to see the name on your mailbox today."

Kagami crossed his arms. "Typical Ahomine. Always showing up in places where nobody wants him. So yeah, we saw your mailbox, and then this runt here wouldn't be satisfied until we came up and said hello or whatever, and so here we are. Hello." He turned to Kuroko. "Can we go now?"

"Nooo you just got here!" Momoi cried. "At least stay for some snacks. Aomine's been getting a lot of sweets and chocolate from people, ever since-"

"Satsuki," Aomine said, gritting his teeth. It was rare for him to get angry at his friend- _genuinely_ angry that is, rather than just the kind of run-of-the mill frustration that he felt when she dragged him to the mall or made him play seizure-inducing cat games for children- and Momoi picked up on it immediately and quieted. 

Aomine cleared his throat, regretting his outburst a little. For Momoi's sake, then, he decided that he would play at civility for a little bit. At least, as long as his injury didn't come up as a topic of conversation. “Okay, if you say so. But what were you doing here anyway?”

Kagami snorted. “Is checking your own mail a crime now?”

“Kagami-kun and myself moved into this building last week,” Kuroko clarified, his voice smooth and impassive as ever. “We were scouted to play basketball at a university nearby.”

That thing in Aomine's stomach that felt things whenever Kuroko was nearby did a backflip. "Wait, you're trying tell me that you two live here now? Like, the same goddamned building that I live in?"

Kagami smirked and opened his mouth, but Kuroko elbowed him (formally and politely) in the ribs before he could deliver any kind of retort. "Yes, on the second floor. Feel free to come by during the evening sometimes if you would like."

Momoi jumped in at this point, back to her normally bubbly self, and assured Kuroko that she would drop in whenever she was there visiting Dai-chan, or maybe even just come to visit him and forget Dai-chan because he was kind of a jerk. Aomine was still having trouble processing this information, and so he let that insult pass. When he spoke again, it was directed at Kuroko. "You're... roommates?" He said the word with difficulty. 

Kuroko nodded. "It was the fiscally responsible thing to do. Since Kagami and I will be going to school together anyway. And practicing basketball together."

"Okay, okay, I heard you the first time, about that." Aomine let out a sigh, brushing a hand through his hair. He thought for a moment, thought and feared things. 

Yes, he'd given up on Kuroko. He knew Kuroko was a lost cause, that he was made of more virtuous stuff or whatever than Aomine and that the two of them could never _happen_ , not even in the kind of fragile chaste way that they'd been at Teiko before Aomine had gone and messed everything up. But... that still didn't mean that he wanted him being roommates with _Bakagami_ of all people. With the person who had gone around for the past three years claiming, with a straight (and stupid) face, that he was Kuroko's new "light", his other half. It had been bad enough in the beginning, when Aomine had still been reeling from having lost Kuroko the first time, but the weird more-than-friendly vibes between them had only gotten worse over the past few years. This was a living arrangement that Aomine was utterly, 100% _not okay_ with, and once his leg was healed and he could move around as usual, Kagami was going topayfor that.

That was what Aomine was thinking. But of course, what he said was considerably less expressive. 

A snort. "Well, there goes the neighborhood."

"Dai-chan!"

Kagami laughed.

No earth-shattering revelations followed that first one, and from there, they did as Momoi had threatened and just "hung out". It had been a while since the four of them had caught up. Aomine was interested despite himself in hearing what Kuroko had been up to since the last time he had seen him, some month or two ago when they'd met up with his other old Teiko teammates to try and bail Kise out of his typically histrionic post-graduation slump.

He wasn't surprised to hear that the two Seirin graduates had continued on to university-level basketball. Although Aomine himself had chosen to part ways with school after landing a position in a minor-league Tokyo team, Kuroko and Kagami both had that kind of goody-goody boy-scout air that made it impossible to imagine them abandoning their education. And, although he hadn't really thought about it before, he supposed it made sense that they would be able to worm their way into the same school. Normally competition to get onto the university teams was cutthroat. However, Kuroko was from the Generation of Miracles, and Kagami was, well... Aomine hated to admit it, but Kagami was a sort of honorary member of the same. Especially since Seirin's shut-out victories at Interhigh and the Winter Cup that past year, there wasn't a university in the region that wouldn't have bent over backward to have the pair on their team. Maybe Aomine would have liked it if the two of them had bypassed university for their minor leagues, just so that he could have somebody competent to play against this season, but he understood why things had ended up the way they did.

Soon, the topic of major life changes and updates had been exhausted. But by that point the group had picked up a sort of lazy inertia that prevented them from dispersing, and so they continued to chat about this and that. Kuroko and Kagami picked Aomine's brain about the best places to go eat and shop nearby, Momoi grilled the two of them for data on their new teammates at the university (most of which she already had some stats on from her time as Touou's manager), and when those topics ran dry, they reverted to their usual standby: reminiscing about the games they had played against each other in the past. 

Eventually Kuroko stood and excused himself from the group, saying that he wanted to go take Nigou for a walk before it got too dark outside. Momoi immediately leapt up at that, exclaiming that she would _love_ to join him, and maybe even show him that little sweets shop that she had mentioned earlier. "It could be like a date!" she said, practically skipping over to the door. 

Kuroko, who had gotten up and had started to button up his light spring jacket, looked over at the couch. Aomine wanted to laugh- was that a touch of desperation he saw on that ever-expressionless face of his? "Would either of you like to join us?"

With a shake of his head, Kagami responded. "Just because I agreed to live with that demon in dog form doesn't mean that I have to walk it. You're on your own, Tetsuya."

Aomine clenched his teeth. Since when had Kagami called him _Tetsuya_? 

"Aomine-kun?" Those sharp blue eyes were fixed on him now. Aomine found that he couldn't say no when looking directly into them, and so he looked away.

"Too much of a hassle," he grumbled. It might have been a good time to mention his injury. If Kagami hadn't been there, he probably even would have. But somehow the words wouldn't come to his mouth.

"Hmm." Kuroko, not finding any help there, looked over toward the door. "Are you ready to go, Momoi-san?"

"Yup!" she bubbled, and attached herself once again to his arm.

The pair left then, leaving nothing but uncomfortable silence behind. Aomine expected Kagami to start getting his things together too, but for some reason he stayed put on the couch, flopped across the cushions as if getting up and leaving was too much effort. _Lazy bastard,_ Aomine thought. But whatever. As long as he kept his mouth shut, Aomine didn’t really care what he was doing. 

It was only when Kagami started _fidgeting,_ casting his eyes around the room dumbly as if trying to find something to comment on, that Aomine’s blood began to simmer. 

"Can I _help_ you, Bakagami?"

When his clipped inquiry was met with nothing more than a blank stare, Aomine exhaled and tried again. "Why are you still here?"

To which Kagami just shrugged. "I don't really feel like going back to my place. There's homework there, you know."

Aomine smirked. "That's only an excuse if you're an idiot."

"Who are you calling an idiot, idiot?"

"Don't call somebody an idiot in their own home. It's rude."

Silence for a moment, broken by Kagami's laugh. "I still can't believe that you live here. You, of all people. I thought I was in a bad location before, but this takes the cake."

"Still waiting for you to leave, Kagami."

The red-haired boy just continued as if Aomine had said nothing. "I guess there's a bright side though. Now I have someone to play one-on-one with. Other than Kuroko, that is. But you know he doesn't count." 

Aomine bristled at the insult, but in the end was forced to agree that Kagami was right. Whatever Kuroko's merits were during team play, it would be hard to argue that they translated in the context of a one-on-one match. Knowing that didn't mean that he had to admit it, though, and so he continued to sit in silence, staring resolvedly at that same stupid article about that same stupid American team that he hadn't cared about even the first time he'd picked up the basketball magazine. 

After a few moments, Aomine sensed some shifting in the corner of his eye. When he looked up, he saw that Kagami was leaning forward, fixing him with the same intense smile that he always wore on the court. "Wanna go play now?"

Aomine gritted his teeth. Of _course_ he wanted to play. Just compared with yesterday, today's Kagami had become at least a hundred or maybe even a thousand times more annoying, and Aomine couldn’t resist wanting to take him down a few pegs. He imagined taking him down to the court and showing him how a _real_ man played basketball, how Kuroko's _real_ light should shine. But his calf was busted and it hurt him even to think about it and that morning he had fallen on his ass when he tried to do so little as to get up and walk to the kitchen for breakfast, and there was nothing he could do about it.

"Fuck off. Go play alone.” 

Silence for a few more moments, followed by a snort of laughter. "Should've known you wouldn't want to come. If there's no Kuroko there for you to show off to, I guess there's no point." 

Aomine frowned. Both of them knew that his feelings for basketball weren't that shallow and conditional. This wasn't Murasakibara they were talking about after all- he was Aomine Daiki, rising star of the Japanese NBL and Touou's former ace. He wondered what Kagami was trying to say. "Why would I need to show off to that guy? He already knows just how good I am." 

Aomine didn't like that smile on Kagami's stupid unsubtle face, or the cocky way that he crossed his arms as he leaned back. "But you still show off for him. You have your normal basketball, the kind that you play when it's just you and me, and then you have Kuroko's basketball, where you hog the ball and do all kinds of cheap flashy tricks to try to get his attention."

"They're not cheap tricks if they work." Aomine huffed out a little laugh. "You should know that. You're the idiot who always falls for them."

"Maybe. But if I'm an idiot, at least I have a chance of getting better someday." Kagami's smirk widened. "It takes a special kind of idiot to spend half a decade being obsessed with someone who doesn’t want you back.”

Ah. _There_ was the play. And even though Aomine had been expecting it, now that the ball was in his court he realized he didn't quite know how to respond. So he fell back on his usual bravado. Normally that tactic worked out well for him.

"You're one to talk. How does it feel to be roommate-zoned?"

Kagami raised an eyebrow. "Hey. For all you know, Kuroko and I could be dating. Lots of people who live together are."

"Don't be a stupid ass. We both know you're not." Kagami's smile dropped a few degrees, confirming that he had, in fact, just been bluffing. It disconcerted Aomine, a little, how relieved that made him feel. 

He continued, his confidence growing with each word. "And stop talking like you know him so much better than me now, just because you follow him around and cook and clean for him and take care of his dog like a slave."

"I'm never the one to take care of Nigou," Kagami muttered. "I'm not that desperate.”

"Don't kid yourself."

Aomine waited for Kagami's answer to that, for some kind of simple-minded retort that would keep the conversation rolling. However, he soon had to accept that none was forthcoming.

"So alright then,” he began, choosing his words carefully. “You and I both have huge boners for Tetsu. More than I wanted to know, but okay. What now?"

"I dunno," Kagami responded. 

Aomine sighed. "Then what was the point of bringing it up? Just to make me start having nightmares about you and Tetsu fucking?"

Well, maybe it wouldn't be a _nightmare_ , per se, Aomine had to admit to himself as, quite against his will, mental images of the two former Seirin players in coitus, Kagami lying back as Tetsu straddled his hips, bouncing wantonly on his cock, floated into his head. As far as he was concerned, a naked and writhing imaginary Tetsu was as good as any imaginary Tetsu, no matter whose imaginary dick he was at the moment being impaled upon.

In real life of course it was different- the second any sensitive part of Kagami's anatomy came within striking range of Tetsu, Aomine was prepared to rip it right off of his body. He would strike like a flash of lightening and he would strike without warning.

Yeah. 

"Nah, it's not that. I just wanted..." Kagami hesitated for a moment, looking down at his freakishly large knees. "Well, you know. I just wanted to be sure. About what you felt about Kuroko, that is. Whether you're really my rival again."

"You're only my rival if you’re at my level. And don't kid yourself- you may have gotten good at basketball, but it's still a thousand years too early for you to think about seducing Tetsu."

Kagami shrugged. "Maybe. But that's the kind of thing that Kuroko should decide for himself."

"I guess you're right." 

Kagami looked at Aomine suspiciously, waiting for the "but". 

Aomine was glad to oblige him. Leaning in a little too close to Kagami for comfort, he smirked. "But, yeah, even if Tetsu’s free to make his own choice, I'm also free to make anyone who touches him pay."

Kagami leaned in even closer. Aomine's threat, far from cowing his rival (because somewhere in the back of his mind, he couldn't think of Kagami as anything less than that), seemed to have energized him. "Well if it's going to be that way, you can forget about ever going after Tetsuya either. I'm a little competitive, you know. It's my weakness."

"You're an idiot if you think that's your only weakness, _Bakagami_ ," Aomine said, trying to ignore the way that his heart was starting to beat like a bass line. Maybe it was the way that he said Tetsuya's given name again, as if he fucking _owned_ him. Maybe it was the glint of those fiery red eyes, that were close enough to be all that Aomine could see right then. _Maybe I'm a little competitive too_. "And you're an even bigger idiot if you think that this is a competition. Tetsu likes impressive people, not inferior gorillas like you." 

Kagami raised an eyebrow. " 'Inferior gorillas'?" he repeated, a smile forming on his lips as he tested out the word. "Who's the inferior gorilla here? Remember how Seirin beat Touou 7 out of the 10 times we played during high school?"

"That's just because my teammates sucked," Aomine said bluntly. "You're still pathetic when it comes to one on one." 

"Don't blame it on your team! And besides, it's not like I always lose against you in street ball."

"Not _always_ , huh? Only most of the time? You should tell Tetsu that. I bet he'd be real impressed."

"Shut up!" Aomine was still nearly nose-to-nose with Kagami at this point, and that sudden outburst made him flinch. "How about you come and play me right now? Winner gets the right to make a move on Tetsuya."

In that moment, when Aomine's blood was pumping and his vision was sharpening and his cheeks were starting to crack with that maniacal smile which Kagami jackass-ish ways always seemed to provoke, he almost accepted his rival's challenge. Almost. But luckily his calf twinged just at the right time, reminding him that, in his current state, victory against Kagami was not a sure bet. And this wasn't a match that Aomine intended to lose. 

"Nah, that's too much work," Aomine eventually responded. "Since I'm going to beat you anyway, I might as well do it quickly.”

“What, scared that I’ll win?” Kagami challenged. 

Aomine pretended to be lost in thought. “You know, I’m starting to warm up to this ‘living in the same building’ deal,” he said. “If Kuroko and I are going to be fucking twice or more a day, it’s convenient that he’ll be so close. And who knows? The rooms are close enough together, maybe you’ll even be able to hear him screaming my name when we do it.” 

Kagami flushed red, gritted his teeth. “Name your challenge. Whatever it is, I’ll beat you.”

Aomine wanted to laugh. He had his rival right where he wanted him now, even if it was down a road that, ten minutes previously, he would never have imagined that the two of them would go down. “Not basketball,” he repeated, stalling for time.

Kagami would have none of that. “You already said that,” he snapped. “If not basketball, then what?”

Possibilities flashed through Aomine’s brain. Fistfight? _Nah, too crude._ Eating competition? _Against_ Kagami _?_ Basketball? _Why does it always come back to that…_

And then finally, he knew what he had to do. 

“Alright, some other game then.” Aomine smiled a predator’s smile, and reveled at how ill-at-ease Kagami looked in response. 

He jerked a thumb at his Xbox. “Rainbow Kitten and Friends Candy Warehouse Escape 2.”

“What the hell is that?” Kagami asked, raising an eyebrow. 

Aomine’s smile grew. “Satsuki’s favorite game. It’s impossible to win.”

Kagami picked up a controller. “You’re on.”

 

The first round that they played, the two of them died simultaneously on the first level. Kagami argued that he had held out for a split second longer, but Aomine claimed that since there weren’t pics, it didn’t happen. They played again.

The second round that they played, the power flickered out on the third level, causing the screen to go blank and the xbox to reboot. They mutually grumbled for a few minutes about having to live in the most cheap-ass dingy apartment in West Tokyo, and then started the game anew.

The third round that they played was interrupted during the fifth level when Momoi and Kuroko returned, Nigou trailing behind them. And of course, being a frisky and rather spoiled dog, the first thing that Nigou did upon entering the strange apartment was hop on on the sofa like he owned the place and start licking Kagami in the face. 

“Disgusting!” Kagami yelled, dropping the controller in his haste to get the little dog off of him. His LoveLove Sparrow promptly died, taken down by the slings and arrows of an outrageous number of chocolate javelins. 

“Told ya you’d lose,” Aomine said with a smirk. 

“That doesn’t count! There’s no way I’ll let you… ah, dammit!” Kagami brought his fist down on the end table. “If it were basketball I wouldn’t have lost.”

“The odds would still have been against you,” Kuroko pointed out. 

Kuroko’s voice was quiet, and calm, and largely inexpressive. But it squeezed at Aomine’s chest anyway. It had been a while since proximity to Kuroko had made it so hard to breathe. Somehow, this regression had to be Bakagami’s fault. 

In a rare peril-free moment, Aomine snuck a glance backwards towards the new arrivals. Kuroko was leaning against the back wall, arms crossed, watching. Momoi, for her part, had bent over onto the couch, propping up her head on the back of the seat as she scanned the screen. "But Kagami-kun isn't dead yet. Dai-chan's friendship bar is full."

"Friendship bars are only for friends," Aomine said, dodging his avatar around a vicious onslaught of lollypops. "We're not playing it co-op."

Momoi pouted. "That's not a nice way to treat a guest."

"Even an uninvited guest? I never said that Kagami could-"

As Aomine spoke, however, he felt Momoi shift behind him. Before he had a chance to react, her arm came hurtling out of his blind spot to grab the control. Her pink-manicured nails mashed a few buttons in quick succession, and LoveLove Sparrow flickered back to life on Kagami's side of the screen.

Kagami laughed, "Thanks, Momoi! Nice speed!"

"Oh, it's nothing," she said, smiling into Aomine's scowl. "Tetsu-kun's just been teaching me a bit of misdirection, that's all."

"My type of misdirection cannot be taught. It is an innate natural gift," Kuroko pointed out. 

Momoi flipped her hair. "Maybe I'm just gifted then."

For a while she continued to play against Kagami, but eventually the redhead got bored and handed his controller off to Kuroko.

"So, looks like I won the game after all," Kagami murmured, taking a seat next to Aomine on the couch. 

"Not a chance," he breathed back, not daring to raise his voice any louder. Although Momoi and Kuroko appeared to be fully engrossed in the game, it was hard to be sure with those two. As an extra precaution, he dropped a few decibels lower when he spoke next. "If Satsuki hadn't come in, you would never have respawned, and Tetsu would already be in my bed." 

Kagami wrinkled his nose. "Stop being such a dirty old man. That's my teammate you're talking about," he pointed out. "Besides, if Nigou hadn't jumped me, I would never have died in the first place."

"Maybe." 

Kuroko and Momoi were at level 8 at this point, and things were really heating up. Nigou, sensing the tenseness of the mood, began to yap and run around in circles. 

"So cute!" Aomine heard Momoi say, even though her eyes never appeared to leave the screen.

"Doppelganger. Shh."

“The dog is ill-trained. He’s not going to respond to that,” Kagami said.

Nigou shh'ed. 

"Okay then, whatever," Aomine said, crossing his arms. "We can have a rematch. When I beat you, I want you to know it for sure."

"Fine," Kagami agreed. "Let me pick the game next time though. This one blows."

"Not basketball," Aomine said automatically.

" _Fine_ , I get it. No basketball, something that's not a lot of work."

Aomine couldn't help but smile at Kagami's frustration. "What'll it be then?"

"Hmm." Kagami thought deeply for a moment. Aomine wisely decided not to make a joke about how out-of-place a thoughtful expression looked on his rival's face. "I don't know yet," he finally announced. "I'll have to think about it."

"You do that."

"I will."

They shook on it. 

Their April went downhill quickly after that. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I've already finished writing the rest of the work, so new chapters will be posted semi-frequently at the rate that I edit them. The POV alternates between Aomine and Momoi.


	2. Competitive Cryptography

 

Chapter 2: Competitive Cryptography

 

Momoi squinted down at the paper in her hand, trying to decipher some of the words- any of the words- scrawled upon its ink-smudged surface. She had known that Aomine's handwriting was bad, but this sample seemed especially deformed. It was almost as if he were _trying_ to make it unintelligible to anyone other than himself. And of course, the possibility that it may be something secret made it all the more compelling.

Yes, she had been rummaging around in his closet again. So sue her. Aomine was the one who’d said that he would be back at his house by nightfall, and that he would bring enough takeout for the both of them if she wanted to drop by. But here she was, quarter past eight, hanging out in an empty living room. No text, no call, no nothing. She felt that she had been well within her rights to go looking for something to occupy her time. This had led her to the stack of basketball magazines in Aomine’s closet, which had quite unintentionally led her to a very different stack of magazines in Aomine’s closet, which in turn had led her to the out-of-place looking blue notebook hidden beneath them...

Which had led her to the paper. Aomine’s private little Voynich manuscript, that really was so illegible that she was taking it on faith that it was even written in Japanese. 

Luckily, there were also a few patches here and there of a different person's writing, and these she was able to read with a bit more ease. 

" 'Springtime Cup Scoreboard'," she read aloud. "Springtime Cup." It wasn't an event that she had heard of before, and since Momoi made it her business to hear of (and attend, and take detailed notes at) any events relevant to her main interests, she concluded that it couldn't be a basketball tournament. Which was strange, because if she didn’t know better she would swear that it sounded like the odd girly twin of the Winter Cup that the high school teams played. 

She smiled at the memories. Although Touou had been eliminated miserably early from the Winter Cup during her and Aomine's first year there, the team had done progressively better thereafter. In her last year as their manager, they'd even made it to the finals, which they'd lost to Rakuzan by a narrow margin. It had been a great game. Maybe Aomine was feeling nostalgic too. Could the “Springtime Cup” have something to do with that?

"It would certainly be in character, for Dai-chan to get nostalgic about things," she muttered to herself, an image of Kuroko popping into her mind. "I thought Dai-chan was finally getting over him, but ever since those two moved in downstairs..."

She let the sentence drop, realizing that she didn’t even know how she had been intending to finish it. Instead, she swept her eyes over the paper again, this time trying to decipher the small islands of text where the mysterious second person's handwriting appeared. For there were several of these sections- it wasn't just the main title of the page. They mostly existed squished up on the margins of the paper or even on top of Aomine's own writing, as if trying to amend or replace what had already been written. 

On their own, the snippets made very little sense. "Ordered to vacate the premises by the police" was probably the clearest of the lot, which was a shame because it cast a kind of shady and illegal-sounding shadow over the whole affair, but some of the others like “it’s fucking _hard_ to catch a squirrel” and “cancelled- mutual cowardice” eased her mind a bit. 

Whatever secret goings-ons that this paper was detailing, they were probably weren’t anything Momoi needed to worry about. At the very least, it didn’t sound like Aomine was acting like a danger to himself or others- a positive change of pace for him, and one which ought to be encouraged. Maybe she should just respect his privacy and put the paper back.

Momoi looked from the paper to the closet to the paper again, and realized in a moment of much clarity but little surprise that, no, she simply could not be content with that. Nothing irked her more than a puzzle that she couldn’t solve, except maybe a puzzle that she couldn’t even read, and to leave this one behind her without any further examination would crush her very soul. 

That having been decided, she sprung into a series of quick, decisive actions to ensure maximum probability of cracking the code. 

1.) She pulled out her phone and took a picture of the page. 

2.) She took the page into the kitchen, where the light was better, and snapped a few more quick shots at varying distances from the page.

3.) She returned the page back into its hiding spot, making sure to leave no trace behind that she had been there- no prying fingerprints, no damningly pink long hairs, nothing. 

4.) And then, once all had been returned to its initial condition, she took out her phone again, navigated to her contacts lists, and hit the “call” button. Tapping a nail against her pink bedazzled phone case, she counted the number of rings before it was picked up on the other end. 

She cut right to the chase. “Tetsu-kun!” she bubbled, “I just found something super mysterious and probably embarrassing in Dai-chan’s porno collection, and I need your help to translate it!”

“Good evening, Momoi-san,” came the belated greeting, in a voice as calm and unhurried as ever. Momoi smiled to herself- it was clear that Kuroko had years of experience fielding off-the-wall phone calls from the more colorful of his friends. “I’m glad to hear you sounding so enthusiastic. However, I must confess that I have a complete lack of interest in the kind of pornography that Aomine hoards, and-”

No matter how important her mission was, Momoi couldn’t help to cut him and tease him at that. “Ooh, so what kind of pornography is it that you _do_ have an interest in?"

Kuroko hardly even paused for a moment before brushing the question off entirely. "And if you need something translated, I would recommend the internet or a language dictionary."

"Tetsu-kun! How can you be so cold when I'm asking you for help? This is why you don't have a girlfriend, you know."

"Well if you keep inundating me with Aomine-kun's disgusting magazines, it’s possible that I’ll never need a girlfriend. Or want one."

Momoi bit down on her tongue, fighting her urge to continue teasing Kuroko about his romantic life. It was a bad habit that she'd developed over her years of reconnaissance work for Aomine- normally she wasn't so bold in talking about such topics, but something about Kuroko's mild, unflappable air just made her want to try to shake him up a little bit. Virgins were cute like that.

Not like Momoi could talk, of course. Although she'd tried her best to find a nice respectable boy to cherish and exhaust over the years, she still had trouble convincing people that Aomine and her weren't an item. The fact that he had ended up beating up her first two boyfriends (both times just because they'd made her cry- but outsiders didn't know that) hadn't done much to help dispel the rumors. 

"But it's not a magazine!" Momoi said. "It might even be G-rated, I can't tell! Come on, just let me show it to you. Are you at home now?"

"I'm studying. I have a test tomorrow."

"Great!" Momoi said, grabbing her bag from the table. "I'll be down in a minute." 

"That's not what I-"

She pressed the end button, and that was that. 

\--- 

The apartment that Kuroko and Kagami shared was quiet that night as well. The TV was off, Nigou was napping, and, according to Kuroko, Kagami was off practicing basketball somewhere. However, unlike Aomine's apartment, it was the sort of place that silence suited. It had an air of subtlety and class, from the elegant painting in the entranceway that neatly matched the rugs to the new-looking leather couch to the row of thriving houseplants by the window. Kuroko must have been the one to decorate the place, Momoi decided. She and Aomine had been to Kagami's old apartment a few times during high school, and the utter lack of visual interest had always stricken her. It was just _wrong,_ that such a great cook could be so lacking in other forms of domesticity.

"Momoi-san." 

"Hmm?" Momoi cast a glance over at Kuroko, who was sitting at the edge of the couch. Although he had a textbook in his lap, it wasn’t opened. 

"How long do you plan to keep using my laptop? I need to access some online texts tonight..."

"Patience, patience,” Momoi said. She had managed to bum the right kind of USB cable from Kagami’s room and was now in the process of uploading the photos she'd taken onto his computer. The process was just about done- only one more button to press. “You'll get your online texts after I show you... this!"

With a flourish, she pressed the computer into his lap. Kuroko flinched at how roughly she handled it, initially, but those worries were soon forgotten as he looked down at the screen. 

"Are Aomine-kun and Kagami-kun working on a project together?" he asked, eyes never looking up from the screen. 

"Kagamin?" Momoi repeated.

"Isn't that his handwriting at the top? It’s small, so it’s hard to tell, but..."

Momoi didn’t have time to deal with Kuroko’s waffling. She grabbed the computer back and, with a few deft taps, enlarged the image. As the characters swelled, Kuroko leaned in and nodded. “Definitely Kagami-kun’s. What is the Springtime Cup?” 

Momoi squealed. “I knew I did the right thing coming to see you!” she said. “Can you read what any of the rest of it says?”

Kuroko took his time looking at the picture, and every second of the waiting was agony for Momoi. Finally, however, he put her out of her misery. “I believe that I can read what it says, but there’s a chance that it’s some kind of code or metaphor. Aomine-kun and Kagami-kun would never agree to do something to something so childish and unnecessary.”

“Do tell!” Momoi inched in closer, looking at the screen over Kuroko’s shoulder. “Read it, read it!”

If Kuroko had any complaints about the way her exaggeratedly large breasts were squeezing against his arms, he did not voice them, In any case, he had more important things to worry about just then. “First off, it’s a list. You see the bullet points here and here.” He pointed them out, taking pains not to get fingerprints on his computer screen. As always, Kuroko took meticulous care of his belongings. 

“Yes, yes, it’s a list. But what does it _say_?”

Momoi looked up at Kuroko, and was struck by the fleeting impression that his eyes were _sparkling_ in some kind of stupid mischievous way. Like he was _teasing_ her. 

“Tetsu-kun is such a jerk!” she burst out, not waiting for any further response. “I bet you can’t actually read it at all!”

And just like that, the expression was gone, although a small shadow of a smile remained. “You are underestimating my abilities, Momoi-san,” he said. “To put it simply, this is a type of scoreboard. A handful of competitions and games are listed, followed by… well, sometimes the name of the victor. But more often, by an excuse for why the competition could not be decided satisfactorily.”

“Hmm” Momoi said. “You’re right, that sounds a little off. Why would Dai-chan be going around playing games with Kagamin when he doesn’t even like him?”

“Aomine-kun and Kagami-kun claim that they’re not friends, that’s true.” Kuroko said, voice pensive. “It’s also true that they have been meeting up to play basketball one-on-one in their spare time for nearly three years now.”

“Boys are stupid. I’ve always said it.” Momoi shook her head. “Present company excluded, of course.”

“Of course.” Kuroko went back to his squint-eyed perusal of the computer screen. “This may be of interest of you. One of the game titles is recorded as ‘Rainbow Cat Escaping from a Warehouse or Whatever.’ Does that sound familiar?”

“Well of course! That’s Rainbow Kitten Candy Warehouse Escape 2, the game that I was obsessed with around the beginning of the month. Remember the night when you moved in and we went on that date to that sweetshop?”

“Yes, the Cavity Cave. I remember it well.”

“Aw, Tetsu-kun!” Momoi snuggled closer to his arm. “I didn’t know you cared.”

“Yes, I remember that they didn’t have any vanilla milkshakes. I’ve encoded it in my memory as a place to avoid from now on.”

“Oh,” Momoi said, deflating.

Kuroko continued obliviously. “That game is the very first one on the list. Whatever the Springtime Cup is, I would assume that it began that night.” 

Momoi watched in anticipation as Kuroko skimmed over the list a little bit more, blue eyes narrowed in concentration. They were a little distracting, those eyes. Momoi knew that she wasn’t in love with Kuroko or anything, at least not in the way that Aomine had asked her to pretend to be. Certainly not in the way that Aomine himself was. But still, she couldn’t help it. Something about the look of intense focus in Kuroko’s eyes brought a smile to her lips. It reminded her a little bit of the first time she had met him. That was back when he’d still been the ghost of Teiko’s third-string gym, running drill after drill in the hours after school, trying to force himself into a mold of athleticism that he just was never meant to conform to. 

Thank goodness they all had found him when they had. She preferred Kuroko the way he was now, and how he could stand on his own two feet. 

“Some of the other items on the list are video games too. There appears to be some contention about whether or not Aomine was, I quote, ‘cheating like a little bitch’ during their Mortal Kombat showdown.”

“He probably was,” Momoi said. “This is Dai-chan we’re talking about. What else is there?”

“Hm. Poker, various tests of courage, and a competition to see who can bench press more.”

Momoi couldn’t help the crease that formed on her forehead. Every time she thought she was hardened to the fact that Aomine would never stop doing whatever idiotic self-destructive things he wanted, he pulled another dumb stunt like that. “Dai-chan’s been going to the gym? Please tell me that basketball isn’t one of the games on that list.”

As everyone involved had expected, Aomine hadn’t been able to keep his injury a secret from Kuroko. His former teammate was too perceptive for that. Within the first few days after the sprain he had come to Momoi and revealed his suspicions, asking for confirmation. And as ever, Momoi was unable to lie to those piercing blue eyes. However, she had asked him not to tell anybody (including Aomine himself), and so he hadn’t. 

In any case, the sprain hadn’t been too debilitating to begin with as long as Aomine stayed off the court and didn’t try to run or jump, and it had been healing well over the past two weeks. His team’s trainer was even starting to talk about Aomine returning to usual practices as early as May. Momoi wasn’t sure if she would go that far, but hearing that had made Aomine happy, so she accepted it. 

“No, no basketball,” he assured her. “I don’t see anything that would require the use of his legs.”

“That’s _something_ , then. So, now the real question- does anything on that paper say why exactly they’re doing this?”

Kuroko answered this with a shrug and a quietly mischievous smile. “Do fools need a reason to do foolish things?”

Momoi snorted.

And then a small tornado entered the apartment.

“Who said that I was going to feed you, _Ahomine_? Go eat at your own damn place. Do you want Tetsuya to starve or something?”

“Tetsu doesn’t even _eat_ food other than milkshakes and-”

“Welcome home Kagami-kun, Aomine-kun.” 

The two of them jumped with surprise, Aomine somehow managing to hit the back of his head against the shelf of the refrigerator that he’d been rummaging through. 

“K-Kuroko! Why aren’t you at the library?” Kagami stammered. “Don’t you have a test tomorrow?”

“I thought it would be quieter at home,” Kuroko responded, turning a blank eye to the guilty expressions on his two lights’ faces. “It wasn’t.” 

“But it was more fun!” Momoi cut in. She surreptitiously reached a hand over to Kuroko’s computer and closed the photo she’d taken of the list. There was no way the two of them could have seen it as the entered the apartment, walls and angles being what they were, but Momoi wasn’t the type to take chances. “Tetsu-kun works too hard. He needs to learn how to take study breaks.” 

Aomine was still rubbing his head where he’d hit it. “I feel bad for you university types. It’s nice not having to study for tests anymore.”

“As if you’ve _ever_ studied for a test, even back in high school,” Kagami said, smirking. “Remember that one semester second year, when you got put on academic probation and suspended you from the team?”

Aomine just glared at him evilly and continued to forage for food. 

“So what were you two up to this late at night?” Momoi wondered.

“Just some one-on-one” Kagami said casually. Momoi glanced over at Kuroko, her own personal lie detector. He saw her looking and gave her a small smile, affirming her intuition that, no, basketball had not in fact been the focus of their evening. “I won, of course.”

At this point Aomine was holding an apple in his right hand. Therefore, he had to punch Kagami with his left hand. It appeared to hurt nonetheless. “What a liar,” he said, speaking over Kagami’s grunts of annoyance. “No, it was another tie. We’re rematching again on Sunday.” 

“Hmm. That sounds interesting,” Kuroko said. “I’m free this weekend, do you need a referee?”

Momoi raised a hand to her mouth, covering the smile that threatened to break across her face. Kuroko could be such a sadist at times. She wondered what kind of excuse the two basketball idiots would use to get out of their friend’s offer. 

“Ah, no need, no need,” Kagami said, waving a hand in what Momoi supposed _Kagami_ supposed was a casual fashion. “I know you don’t have much free time anyway, so you really don’t need to waste it watching weaklings like Aomine lose.”

Aomine then went through a series of color changes from red to pale to a sort of sick greenish- a set of transformations made doubly impressive by the ordinarily-so-concealing tanness of his skin- as he realized that any attempt to contradict Kagami would just push them deeper into Kuroko’s trap. And so for once in his life, he didn’t talk. He just chomped at his apple with unusual malice.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind,” Kuroko said. He then looked over at Momoi. “But as for right now, I have to ask all of you to excuse me. I’m going to go study in my room, where it’s quiet.”

“Aw, you don’t want to play any more today?” Momoi pouted. “You’re not off the hook yet, you know. You still need to help me with… that thing. You know. I’ll come by again tomorrow.” 

Kuroko limited his response to a small nod as he got up and collected his school things. Weaving through the sea of Kagami and Aomine’s queries regarding exactly _what_ the two of them had just been occupied with, the blue-haired shadow crossed the living area and retreated to his room.

Momoi looked over at the two idiots in the kitchen, and for a moment was struck by how similar they looked. True, as far as their physical appearance went the two were nothing alike. Maybe their height was almost the same, and they shared the kind of lean-muscled physique characteristic of many basketball players, but their coloration, for example, couldn’t be more different. But the way that they both were looking at Kuroko’s closed door right then, their expressions simmering with some dirty mix of affection and caution and something maybe possibly resembling desire… 

Well, it wasn’t as if any of this was news to Momoi. Kuroko was lovable, and so yeah, it made sense that he would be loved. But as always, it made her wonder how long the four of them could keep coexisting like this before everything changed again. Momoi didn’t like change. She hoped it would be a good long while. 

 


	3. Backgammon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a little short and stumpy, but oh well.

Kagami and Aomine, however, did not share their pink-haired acquaintance’s apprehensions about change. They lived their lives more or less unexamined, rushing forward so quickly and so carelessly that they didn’t even notice when the scenery transformed around them.

It started one day when they were playing backgammon, of all things. Aomine didn’t really know why they had chosen this game to play. He had never heard of it before the “Springtime Cup” (as that idiot Kagami had so whimsically entitled their race to get into Kuroko’s pants), and even after his opponent had gone through the rules earlier that afternoon, his grasp of how to play it remained superficial at best. But Kagami owned a board, and had fond memories of playing it with his mother as a child, and the two of them were kind of running out of options for non-basketball games. So here they were.

They went through their pre-challenge routine as usual. Since they were in Kagami’s apartment today, the tasks of getting drinks and snacks together fell to him. 

“Cookies okay? I think I’ve got a roll from the convenience store somewhere…”

Aomine, who was over in the living room setting up the table, grunted. “I got you six fucking burgers last week, and you think you can pay me back with some cheap-ass cookies?”

“I cook for you all the time. Give me a break.”

“Tch. They better at least be chocolate.”

They finished setting up the game, munched a little on the cookies, and then the challenge began.

Fifteen minutes later, and Aomine had to admit that things weren’t going so well. Backgammon favored those who could roll high numbers on the dice, and he had just gotten a humble five. 

He eyed his pieces with some frustration, trying to figure out the best strategy to usher them across the board. He was taking it on faith that there was even any strategy _involved_ \- most of the time, it just seemed like luck and chance to him. He moved some pieces at random, trying to look wise as he did so. 

“Your move, Bakagami.” Aomine picked up the dice and flicked them across the table. His aim was good- one of them even bounced of one of Kagami’s weird split eyebrows before dropping onto the floor and skittering away. Kagami grumbled as he bent to retrieve it. 

“Sulk however much you want, _Ahomine._ That doesn’t change the fact that I’m winning by a mile.”

“I’ll come back,” Aomine said. “My beginner’s luck’ll kick in soon.”

His rival hmmed, unconvinced, as he began his turn. When he rolled the dice, he got an eleven. 

“You were saying?” Kagami said, a smile on his face as he pressed his tiles onward. 

Shit. Aomine really _was_ about to lose. If he didn’t get at least a nine right now, Kagami would be able to beat him within two turns. Holding his breath, he blew on the dice and rolled.

A three. 

Aomine just stared at the dice for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Luckily, though, he wasn’t the kind of person who always needed to think before speaking. “Nothing about this contest is fair. I don’t accept it. You’ve been playing this stupid board game all your life, and I just learned it today.”

Kagami raised an eyebrow. It didn’t seem like he had noticed the full magnitude of Aomine’s predicament yet- maybe he had been confident enough that he would win from the start that he didn’t recognize that his victory had just shifted from probable to inevitable. “You agreed to it before we started. You could’ve said no, but you didn’t.”

And that was true, of course. But Aomine wouldn’t be Aomine if he didn’t continue to argue. “But I’ve been thinking since then. What the hell does any of this have to do with Tetsu? Why does it matter who’s better at board games, if we’re just trying to figure out who gets to fuck him?”

Kagami rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re in this contest for, but I know that I want to do more than just have sex with Tetsuya. He’s special to me. I want to date him.”

Something rolled in Aomine’s stomach. He forced it down before it could reach his throat. “Wow, Kagami, I didn’t know you were actually a middle school girl.” 

Kagami laughed. “Say what you will, but I know that you want the same thing. You’ve been drooling over him since you actually _were_ in middle school- there’s no way that’s just a sex thing. Tetsuya’s hot, but he’s not that hot.”

“Tetsu is very hot.” Aomine frowned. “And if I could have jumped him at Teiko, I would’ve. But he wasn’t ready then.”

Naturally, Aomine left out the part where he himself hadn’t been ready either. Their relationship back then had been a tenuous one, all sweaty palms and nervous kisses. At least it had been until that last night, the night after nationals during third year.

In some ways the dissolution of the Generation of Miracles had been a slow burn, beginning with first-year rivalries and only becoming obvious to outsiders after their joint elevation to the level of gods. At other times, it was the work of a second to cut the ties between them. The night of nationals was an example of the latter case. And even though Aomine and Kuroko both recognized that they had gone too far at that time, Aomine still stayed up some nights wondering whether, if he’d gone just a little bit further, if he’d opened up his heart just a little bit more, they could have come out the other side and salvaged their broken relationship.

But Kagami couldn’t know about any of that.

“ ‘ _He wasn’t ready then_.’” the redhead snorted. “And you’re still trying to argue that you’re not in love with him? If you aren’t, then don’t waste my time like this. Tetsuya would never choose a night with you over an actual relationship with me.”

“Hah. As if Tetsu’d be satisfied with just one night with me.” Aomine leaned in, forcing a predator’s smile onto his face. The smile even became halfway genuine when he saw Kagami swallow firmly. Over the past few weeks, Aomine had learned a bunch of novel ways to push the other boy’s buttons. The very best methods of doing this were either to talk about sex, or talk about Kuroko, or, better still, to combine the two topics together. And so he did so at every opportunity. “I can do things to his body that he’s never even imagined, fuck him so hard that he won’t even remember your name any more. Ha, or anything else, come to think of it. There’s no way he’ll be satisfied doing it just once.”

To his credit, though, Kagami never once broke eye contact. “So you yourself admit that you won’t be enough to satisfy him in a single go.” 

Aomine flipped him a rude gesture and looked away. The backgammon board was still set up between them. He started putting it away, secure in the knowledge that he was going to get what he wanted, and didn’t look up again until he heard Kagami’s sigh.

“Okay then. _Again_ , we will do this your way. How do you think we should decide which of us is more worthy of Tetsuya?” 

Aomine pondered this for a moment. He needed to avoid getting into another situation like the one he’d been in tonight, when he’d been suckered into playing a game that Kagami himself was a seasoned veteran at. Since the situation worked against Aomine, he had called it unfair. Of course, if he could engineer a challenge where the opposite was true and Kagami was at a disadvantage, he’d feel no qualms about calling it something like “shrewd” instead. But… was there anything that Aomine was good at other than basketball?

And then he had a thought. It was a good thought, and a bit fiendish, which made it hard to keep a straight face as he turned it into a proposal. “Well, since you’re so dead set on being Tetsu’s girlfriend, maybe we could run with that a little. Test out who would be more compatible with him and his lifestyle.”

Kagami cocked an eyebrow. “I am Tetsuya’s roommate. I live with him on a daily basis. Do you  really think that you could beat me in a competition like that?”

“I could beat you in any competition, Bakagami.” Aomine leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head in a gesture of calculated casualness. “So, who would you say that Tetsu’s best friend is, these days?”

There was some caution in Kagami’s voice as he responded. “Me. Duh.”

Aomine shook his head. “No, other than you. You’re not his friend; your intentions are too disgusting. Who’s his best _real_ friend?”

It was a sign of how much time the two of them had been spending together recently that Kagami didn’t retaliate to that insult in like kind. Instead, he just scrunched his forehead a little. “I don’t know, maybe Kise? He’s not around too much because of filming and stuff, but I know the two of them text a lot.”

Aomine nodded. It was just as he’d expected. Even though Kise had taken the predictable jump from modeling to a career in acting since graduating from high school and as such spent his time traveling around the country and beyond, he knew that the blond was too clingy and hyperemotional to give up his relationships with his old friends. Take that senpai of his from Kaijou, for example- Kasamatsu or whatever his name was. Even though he’d moved on to university a year earlier, Kise had still somehow roped him into coming to his recent graduation party, though it seemed to have been quite against the older boy’s will. As much as Aomine hated to admit it, Kuroko and Kise had also shared something special back at Teiko, a kind of friendly rivalry that had seemed to only grow when they met each other again in high school. 

Ruddy eyes met his from across the table. He could almost feel the distrust radiating from them. “Why? What does Tetsuya’s best friend have to do with anything?”

“I was just thinking,” Aomine began. “Don’t you think that Tetsu’s boyfriend would have to spend a lot of time with his other friends? It’s one of the big tests of whether a relationship’ll work out, you know, whether a person’s friends like their new boyfriend or not.”

Originally, Aomine had not known this either. But after having put up with a seemingly endless parade of “sucking up to the childhood friend” from the scumbags who wanted to date Momoi for the past few years, he had taken the lesson to heart.

“Really?” Kagami wondered. It was almost cute, how little experience he had in matters like this.

“Really.” Aomine nodded his head confidently. 

“So… what are you suggesting? We ask Kise to decide the whole thing for us?”

“Don’t be an idiot!” Aomine snapped. “We can’t tell Kise anything about the Cup, he’ll tell Tetsu. Nah, I was just thinking about another game. Something like, the ‘who can put up with Kise Ryouta for the longest’ game.” 

“Hmm.” The gears turned slowly in Kagami’s mind, and Aomine had to wait a few moments for his answer. “So we would just… find Kise, and hang out with him, and whoever can’t take it anymore and leaves first loses?” 

“That’s what I was thinking.”

More turning, more waiting, but at least Kagami looked less suspicious than he had before. “I guess that shouldn’t be too hard. And Kise’s scheduled to come back this week. He was in America up until now for some new movie, but Tetsuya told me today that they had plans for Saturday…” 

“Good,” Aomine said, with a note of finality. “We’ll tag along then.”

 


	4. Fifteen Kilometer Relay

Momoi adjusted the strap of her schoolbag over her shoulder. Although even on a usual day the bag was heavy- such was the plight of a student of investment banking- her visit to Kuroko and Kagami had occasioned her to stuff it full with even more folders and files than usual. 

She’d thought that, after her graduation from Touou, she would never need to be consultant to a sub-pro basketball team ever again. Aomine was out of that dark period in his life that she had to look after him 24/7, and so that meant that there was no more need to be a part of his basketball in the way she always had been. From now on, she’d thought, instead of spending her nights looking up stats on the internet and her weekends scouting games where she had little or no personal connection with any of the players, she would finally be free to do whatever it was that normal girls did. Like… hang out at the mall, or go on dates, or whatever. 

Momoi had tried those things for a little while. But they were _boring_. So, more data collection it was.

Although the university basketball season was far from its start, the teams were already in the thick of training. Kuroko and Kagami’s team even had a practice match on the calendar for for the following week against the neighboring university. Studying up on their opponents for that match had provided a few hours of entertainment over the previous few nights, and Momoi was anxious to discuss her findings with the two of them. 

However, as soon as she rounded the corner that would bring their apartment building into sight, Momoi got a brief little tingling in her brain that told her that something was not quite as it should be. As a test, she tried to look to her right. Her eyes’ subconscious hesitation to do so confirmed her suspicions: Kuroko was somewhere in the vicinity, and he was using misdirection with all his might. 

“Tetsu-kun?” she called, feeling a little foolish as a pair of girls walking by glanced in her direction. To an outsider, it must have looked like she was talking to empty air. 

And then to an outsider, it must have looked like Momoi had some kind of spasm that caused her to reach her arm out and follow it, eyes wide, into a nearby alleyway.

Kuroko materialized in front of her then, ghostlike as ever in a white t-shirt and equally white sneakers. “I apologize, Momoi-san. A group of Kagami-kun’s admirers were walking by at the moment you called, and I wanted to avoid being seen by them.” 

It was a testament to her years of friendship with Kuroko that Momoi was able to recover from such a shock so quickly. Within a moment, the fright in her eyes melted away to genuine joy, and she shot Kuroko a smile. "Oh, don't worry about it! I'm just happy to see you- at first, I thought that if Tetsu-kun was using misdirection, that meant that he was avoiding me."

Kuroko shook his head. "It's been a while since I've been able to use the full force of my misdirection on you, Momoi-san."

Momoi didn't know whether that meant that she was growing immune to it or whether Kuroko had just decided to stop using it on her. Whichever reason it was, she found that she didn't mind. "So, Kagami-kun has admirers now, huh? He must be enjoying that. They were both such pretty girls!"

"I don't think that he's enjoying it. Of course, he doesn't appear to be hating it either. It might be most accurate to say that he is indifferent to the entire situation." 

Momoi laughed. "That sounds like our Kagamin. Blind to everything except for basketball and burgers. I wonder if he'll ever get a girlfriend." 

To Momoi's surprise, Kuroko seemed amused by her comment, and smiled as if at a joke she did not understand. "Probably not," he agreed. "Although, he may notice more that you give him credit for."

Some past data clicked through Momoi's head, and after a few moments of analysis she was able to both understand what Kuroko was trying to imply and also come to the conclusion that he was probably right.

From a statistical standpoint, Momoi wouldn’t have said it was possible for all seven male members (and honorary members) of the Generation of Miracles to be gay. But then again, if they were already miracles, she wouldn’t put it past them to the statistical improbabilities as well.

Poor Kagami.

But Momoi hadn't come all this way to discuss Kagami's sexual preferences. As a matter of fact, that was probably the last thing in the world that she even wanted to think about, considering how much trouble her last good-natured attempts to intervene in a friend's love life had been. "Well, good for him. Say, is Kagamin home right now? Because I've compiled a set of data sheets about the team that you guys are playing next week, and I was wondering if you had time to look them over with me. They have some interesting players."

"You're a good friend, Momoi."

The compliment caught Momoi off guard. She was thankful that it was getting dark outside- otherwise it might have been difficult to hide the blush that sprang to her cheeks. 

Fortunately, Kuroko didn’t seem to notice, having once again donned his misdirection and approached the entrance to the alleyway. Momoi watched him (eyes straining to keep up with his position) with some curiosity as he poked his head out, looked in both directions, and then beckoned her forward with a gesture. 

“The coast is now clear,” he said. 

“Good! So, should we head up to your place?”

Kuroko looked at her, face expressionless. “You may go up if you’d like. However, it’s 7:30PM. I often go for an evening run at 7:30PM.”

“But Tetsu-kun-”

Without another word spoken, Kuroko set off down the street. Cursing Kuroko and all basketball players and all stupid _boys_ , Momoi followed after him.

For the most part she was able to keep up. Although Kuroko had called his exercise for the night a “run”, considering its pace it may have been more correct to term it a “jog”. However, Momoi was nonetheless thankful that she was wearing sensible shoes, rather than the cute flats that she’d been considering changing into.

“Where are we running to?” she managed to gasp out at one point.

“I don’t know,” Kuroko answered her. Even though he was sweating and had all of the exterior signs of being tired, his voice was as even as ever. “I try to run in a different direction each day. It’s my way of learning how to navigate in this new part of town.” 

“Oh. Can’t you just look at a map?” Momoi liked maps. There was something calming to her about being able to look down on a system as complex as a city from a god’s-eye-view, watching as all of the disparate pieces of infrastructure- streets, buildings, parks, water bodies- came together into a unified whole. 

But apparently Kuroko was of a different mind. “I could. But some things just need to be experienced.”

They ran in silence for a while, padding their way down unfamiliar roads. Sometimes they turned at intersections, but these changes of direction always struck Momoi more as one of Kuroko’s whims than any sort of concerted effort to reach a destination. 

Eventually, though, Momoi began to recognize some of the street signs, which prompted her to speak up again. “I know where we are now. This is near Touou.”

“Is that so?” Kuroko looked around, nearly tripping over himself the moment his eyes left the road. Momoi smiled- the blue-haired boy was clearly on his last legs. But she supposed Kuroko wouldn’t be Kuroko without his bad habit of pushing himself past his limits. 

“Yeah, it’s just a few blocks that way.” She pointed to the right, past a corner where a food vendor was closing up shop for the night. “I’ll race you.”

“You will most likely win,” Kuroko remarked. But he rose to the challenge anyway, and put up a good fight during the final stretch. 

Ultimately, however, Momoi was the first to lay a hand on the brick wall surrounding the high school’s grounds. 

“Good fight, Tetsu-kun!” she said, huffing and puffing against the wall. As soon as they had stopped running, the fatigue had hit her _hard_ , as well as the back strain from carrying such a heavy bag. With difficulty, she raised her wristwatch to her eyes. “We’ve been running for more than an hour! You’re a monster, do you always go this far?”

Kuroko just shook his head. He too looked affected by the length of the run- he was bent over nearly double, with only the tension of his hands on his knees keeping him from falling. “Not usually. But I find that my stamina improves when I run with other people.”

“Oh.” Momoi thought for a moment. “Why don’t you run with Kagami-kun then?”

“I do, sometimes.” 

Momoi waited for further explanation, either for why the two roommates didn’t run together more often or for why he had started sounding sad all of the sudden. But none was forthcoming. 

“You could also run with Daiki, once his leg gets better,” Momoi offered, chattering a bit to fill the silence. “Like you guys used to.”

“Aomine-kun doesn’t run anymore unless he’s on the court. He thinks its boring.” 

“He’ll run if I tell him to!”

That comment surprised a smile out of Kuroko. Momoi treasured it a little before continuing. 

“And even once Dai-chan’s leg is healed, he won’t be able to start playing basketball right away. He’ll need to build back up to it slowly. Jogging might be one of the first steps.”

“That could be true.” Kuroko had regained his breath a bit by this point. He stood up again and began to stretch. Momoi smiled- possibly through some weird subconscious empathy, he started out by stretching his right calf, the same one that Aomine had injured. “But I still predict that Aomine-kun won’t want to run with me. He’s tried to hide his injury from me since day one, I can’t imagine that he’ll change his mind and ask for his help with rehab.”

His voice didn’t sound hurt. But somehow, Momoi knew that he was. “Dai-chan’s just embarrassed. He’s not keeping things from you because he hates you or anything like that. He just doesn’t know what to do.” She rubbed the back of her neck. After all this time, she still could never figure out just how Kuroko felt about Aomine. Did he know that Aomine still loved him? Did he know that he _ever_ had? “He respects you a lot, you know.”

“If he respected me, he wouldn’t tell such obvious lies.”

And, Momoi had to concede, there was a lot of truth in that statement. “Well, yeah. But this is Dai-chan we’re talking about. He honestly doesn’t know how bad he is at lying.” 

“I guess so.” 

He continued to stretch. Momoi tried to join him, but her lack of proper exercise attire impeded her flexibility enough to make the effort worthless. Defeated, she went back to leaning against the wall, counting the headlights of the cars that passed them. 

It was Kuroko who spoke next. “I just thought of something that you and I have in common. Out of all of the friends each of us currently have, Aomine-kun is the one that both of us have known the longest.” 

Momoi twisted that statement around in her head, examining it. It was true enough, she supposed. Aomine’s parents and her own had been friends since before either of them were born- she had always had the weird suspicion that they had even coordinated their pregnancies such that their firstborn would be the same age. And even though Kuroko hadn’t met Aomine until middle school, as far as Momoi knew he hadn’t kept in touch with any of his friends prior to his teammates at Teiko. 

_He couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to, the guys at Teiko being how they were._ Momoi’s chest twinged for a moment as she thought about what her old team had done- without even realizing it, blinded by their own self-centeredness- to Kuroko’s childhood friend. 

She had to stop thinking about that. They’d all grown since then, hadn’t they?

Kuroko kept talking as she reminisced. “He’s changed a great deal over the years. But strangely enough, sometimes I still think of him as the Aomine-kun that I first met back at Teiko. The Aomine-kun who helped me train when I was still in the third string, and who unintentionally inspired my specialization in passing.”

Momoi laughed. “The Aomine-kun that you kept pretending that you didn’t like to kiss.” 

Although the two of them had rarely talked about Aomine and his relationship since it had ended, her comment didn’t seem to surprise him. “I will always be grateful to the Aomine-kun from back then,” he concluded.

But Momoi couldn’t be satisfied with that. She didn’t know why she was pressing him so hard. Maybe it was the nighttime and the anonymity it brought, maybe it was exhaustion, maybe it was the echo of his words from before ( _“You’re a good friend, Momoi”- not Momoi-san, just Momoi_ ). For some reason, Momoi felt that there was an opportunity before her, one that wouldn’t come around so easily a second time. 

So, she found herself saying some words that she wouldn’t have imagined being bold enough to speak just minutes before. “What about the Aomine-kun from right now? How do you feel about him?”

“He is one of my best friends. I’m sad that our basketball teams won’t be able to play each other anymore. And I was happy to learn that he lived in the same building as Kagami and myself.”

Momoi wanted to groan. Kuroko wasn’t stupid enough to miss the point like that. She didn’t know why he even pretended to. “But do you still love him?”

He paused for a moment, considering his words. “I suppose. I want him to be happy, at least. And to feel loved even when he’s hurting. I’ve always wanted that very much, even for the Aomine-kuns in the past that I have not been grateful to.” When he looked over at Momoi, she was surprised to see that he was smiling. “But between you and me, Momoi-san… I’ve felt for a long time that Aomine is within arm’s reach of that kind of happiness. And after the events of the past few weeks, as well as certain of my own efforts, I am more confident than ever that I’m not wrong.” 

“What do you mean by that?” Momoi wondered. “Is that a yes or a no?”

Kuroko just kept stretching.

“So Tetsu-kun can’t use misdirection on me anymore, but he can still be irritating and secretive, is that how it is?”

“We should probably take a train home. I don’t think that I’ll be able to run another hour. I don’t want to faint and perish,” Kuroko said, his voice giving no hint to the personal matters that the two of them had just been discussing. He looked to the left. “The station is down this road, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes, but-” Momoi began. She found herself cut off as Kuroko started walking away from her. “Tetsu-kun! Come back here!” she yelled, jogging a few steps to catch up to him. “We’re not done talking!”

But even though she continued to press him (verbally as well as physically) for answers during the whole ride home, Kuroko refused to say another word about the matter. 

And so it was that Momoi squandered an opportunity that only comes once every six years. 

 


	5. The "Putting Up With Kise Ryouta" Challenge

Saturday dawned cold and rainy, another April shower that Momoi, who had once again crashed at Aomine’s place after an evening of takeout and bro-time the night before, claimed would certainly lead to May flowers later down the line. That had been before she’d retreated into his bathroom with her makeup and hair products more than half an hour ago, of course.

Her absence right then was somewhat of a relief. She really was too cheerful in the mornings, Aomine thought, guzzling down a bottle and a half of Pocari to chase away the mild hangover that had settled in. He knew he shouldn’t have drunk so soon before that day’s competition. It had been stupid, and impulsive, and he was going to regret it come noon when he had to meet Kagami for their appointment. But after that text from Kuroko the afternoon before, Aomine hadn’t been able to stop himself. 

They’d been talking about their plans with Kise for the following day. Far from being annoyed by the intrusion, Kuroko had actually sounded happy that Kagami and Aomine (and therefore by extension Momoi also) would be joining them. At first that had made Aomine happy too, until Kuroko had burst out with this gem:

_“I feel like I never see Kagami-kun anymore. Aomine-kun keeps stealing him away.”_  

What the hell was that supposed to mean? No matter how many times Aomine looked at the text, read it and reread it, he still couldn’t understand what exactly he was trying to say. Because obviously it was a lie- Kuroko and Kagami were together _all the goddamned time_ , sharing little moments like walking to school and eating breakfast and dealing with Nigou’s annoying shit. If there was anybody that Kuroko wasn’t seeing that often anymore, it was Aomine. 

He took another angry swig of his sports drink, almost choking as some of it went down the wrong pipe. As he coughed and sputtered into the sink, Aomine chided himself internally. So Kuroko had said something else weird about Kagami. Whatever. His friend was just being his usual cagey self, nothing more. The text was probably some form of misdirection. _A phantom shot through my heart_ , Aomine thought. 

He then dunked his head under the kitchen faucet as a punishment for thinking such stupid things. 

 

By noon Aomine had managed to regain himself a bit, after a little more rehydration and a lot of nagging on Momoi’s part. At least he had managed to relieve some of the pounding in his head and to get dressed for a day on the town. The way he dressed when “going out” was not that much different than he did for an average day, so that made it easier. He just had to put on some basketball shorts, a long-sleeve tee, and a pair of old sneakers and he was good to go. There wasn’t much he could do about his rumpled blue hair and those deep lines under his eyes, but oh well. He was going to be hanging around with Kise; it wasn’t as if anybody’s eyes would be on him anyway. 

They made their way to Kuroko and Kagami’s room by about quarter after, being sure to arrive fashionably late. As expected, just the sight of Aomine’s face set Kagami off right away.

“Where have you been, you asshole? We were about to leave without you!”

“No you weren’t,” Aomine countered smoothly. He looked over at Kuroko, smiling at the disapproving look in his blue eyes. “Sup, Tetsu.”

“Good afternoon, Aomine-kun, Momoi-san.”

“Aominecchiiii!” 

Without warning, Aomine found himself at the level of Kuroko’s shoe rack, ass in pain and unable to move his arms. 

“Aominecchi! I haven’t seen you since graduation, it’s been so long! It’s like you’re a stranger now! Huh, have your muscles gotten smaller? Momoicchi, you need to remember to feed him regularly and-”

“Why is it my job to feed him?” Momoi griped. “And why are you only saying hello to him and not to me?”

Kise looked up at her, his amber eyes widening. “But Momoicchi, we talk all the time on the computer-”

A vein throbbed in Aomine’s forehead. It was bad manners, he figured, to shove someone violently to the floor and then not even pay attention to them afterwards. “Kise. Get. The. Hell. _Off of me_.” With a mighty effort, he dislodged himself from the blonde’s death grip. 

“Wah, so mean!” Kise was still smiling though. “I’ll take that to mean that you missed me too. Sooo, how’ve you been?”

Aomine’s backside still hurt a little and he took in a deep breath, ready to give Kise a piece of his mind. But then he caught sight of Kagami’s smirking face above him. Aomine didn’t like how close he was standing to Kuroko.

In the space of a moment, his spirit of competition overwhelmed how annoyed he was at his former teammate, and Aomine smiled in a way that was almost pleasant. “I’ve been fine. Practicing hard with the new team. How was America?”

“America was amazing!” Kise began, stars and hearts sparkling in his voice. “You’ll never believe all of the crazy stuff I saw over there. Like did you know- they make these things that are like blankets with sleeves sewn into them, so you can stay warm while still holding a drink or whatever, and so I look at them and I think, what if we could incorporate that into a _kotatsu_ somehow-”

“Maybe we can talk and walk at the same time?” Kuroko suggested. And before any of them really put any conscious thought into it, they found themselves out of the apartment and making their way towards the stairs.

“Where are we going?” Kagami asked as he locked the door behind them. 

“Oh, Kurokocchi and I thought we’d go to the aquarium. It’s too rainy to do anything outdoors anyway.” Kise sighed, blonde locks flipping across his face in what must have been a carefully-practiced fashion. “It’s a shame. I had really wanted to have a picnic outside with everyone.”

“The aquarium’s better anyway. Fish and marine mammals are very educational.” Kuroko said, his tone of voice hinting at similar arguments between the two of them over the past few days. For a brief moment, Aomine wondered whether Kuroko had made another leap in his mind-control powers and was now at the stage where he could bend even the weather to his will. However, the very idea was ridiculous, and he soon discarded it. 

Aomine didn’t talk much on the way to the aquarium. Even if he’d wanted to, it would have been hard to get a word in edgewise around Kise. The actor was just as expressive as usual, regaling them all with tales of his travels in America, of the oddities he’d seen, the celebrities he had met. Every now and again he would direct a comment at one of his comrades, or just shout one of their names and glom onto the unlucky victim for no reason like the spastic toddler he was, but Aomine was used to that. This competition was going to be a cinch. 

The aquarium was on the other side of town and, even with the metro, it took the five of them a while to get there. A familiar throbbing started to set into Aomine’s right calf partway into their journey, causing him to be even less sociable than usual. Once they exited the train and re-emerged onto the sidewalk, he tried to drop inconspicuously to the back of their party where he could revel in self-pity in peace. But Kuroko would be having none of that. 

“It’s good to see you, Aomine-kun.”

Aomine sighed. If Kuroko missed Kagami so much, why wasn’t he walking with him up front? Or with Kise, who was supposed to be his best friend-without-benefits? But despite Aomine’s frustration, he couldn’t find it in himself to breathe a word of his insecurities to Kuroko. “You too, Tetsu.”

They walked side by side for a little ways, Aomine focusing on not showing any traces of a limp, Kuroko focusing on appearing and disappearing from view in slow, even pulses. 

After about the seventh or eighth cycle of this, Aomine couldn’t help but comment. “Don’t use your misdirection on me. It’s weird.”

“I’m not using it on you specifically. I’m just practicing.” 

“You’ve had more than five years to practice it,” Aomine pointed out. “Take one afternoon off.”

As if to spite him, Kuroko seized that opportunity to disappear again. But even though Aomine couldn’t see him, he could still sense his position easily enough to aim a light punch at his shoulder and more or less hit the mark. 

Empty air punched Aomine back. It was an interesting sensation. “I think I’m nearing a breakthrough,” he heard. “A new way of doing things.”

Aomine shook his head. “If you would just improve your fundamentals, you wouldn’t have to come up with a new gimmick every damn season.” 

“Where would be the fun in that?” 

“I manage to have plenty of fun just… you know. Playing.” Aomine didn’t know why an image of Kagami, eyes glinting as the two of them faced off on the court, popped into his head just then, or why even why he tried to change it to a less annoying-looking basketball memory the red-haired boy kept showing up. Kagami dunking. Kagami meteor-jamming. Kagami tossing a basketball lazily from hand to hand as they walked to an outdoor court together. Kagami watching Aomine from the bench during one of their high school games, focused, face serious. 

“That’s because Aomine-kun is a simpleton,” said Kuroko’s disembodied voice.

_Maybe if Tetsu spent less time being fucking_ invisible _, I would have more memories of him playing basketball. Selfish bastard._  

“Hey. Don’t make me punch you again.”

“You would have to locate me first.”

“Don’t underestimate me. I know exactly where you are.” But instead of punching Kuroko this time, he just reached out and rested his hand on the top of the smaller boy’s head. Kuroko’s hair was soft, and floppy, and felt nice underneath his fingers. 

There had once been a time when Aomine had been free to touch Kuroko like this whenever he wanted. Aomine could hardly remember those days anymore. 

His reminiscences were cut short when Kuroko rematerialized and shook his hand away. “Please don’t touch my hair. It took a lot of effort to flatten it this morning.”

Aomine refused to recognize the pang that he felt as Kuroko slipped away. “Doesn’t it every morning?”

By the time they arrived at the aquarium, Kise had squealed over four cute dogs, stopped to sign sixteen autographs, and had accidentally groped Kagami twice. Unsurprisingly, Kagami seemed a little ticked off by this, and for a moment Aomine reveled in the knowledge of his certain victory. 

“Kurokocchi! Hey, come look for seahorses with me! Or maybe they have an octopus, let’s look for that!”

“If Ki-chan wants to find an octopus, he doesn’t need to look any further,” Momoi murmured, sidling up to Aomine’s right side. “It’s like he has tentacles of his own.” 

Aomine followed her gaze to the rest of the group, grinning as he saw what Momoi meant. Kise, clingy at the best of times, had somehow found a way to wind up both Kuroko and Kagami simultaneously in his arms. He was surprised that either of them could even breathe, given how tightly they were being restrained. 

“Tentacles and suction cups,” Aomine replied in a low voice. The two of them shared a laugh. 

“Is your leg doing okay?” Momoi asked once they had finished. “If you want, I could suggest sitting down in the video room for a while.”

Aomine wrinkled his nose. “Nah, I’m fine. Really,” he added, speaking directly to the mistrusting look on her face. “It hurt a little when we were walking up the stairs, yeah, but I’m okay now.” 

“If you say so.” 

“Momoicchi, Aominecchi, what are you whispering about? You’re making me feel out of the loop.” Kise made his way towards them, arms still encircling his prey. 

“You have a huge pimple on the back of your neck. We were just making fun of it.” The lie left Aomine’s lips easily and hit the mark dead on. Ignoring Kise’s shrieks that he could never work in show biz again and his frenzied attempts to spin around and inspect the back of his own neck, Aomine came in closer and pulled Kuroko out of the blonde’s grip. “Let’s go, Tetsu. What do you want to look at first?”

Kuroko had already come up with a detailed itinerary of all of the exhibits that he wanted to visit (seahorses and octopi were, by what Kuroko claimed to be pure coincidence, near the top of that list), and so the group spent the next few hours working through it. 

Against all expectations, it was actually kind of fun.  Kise behaved himself more or less, barring one unfortunate incident involving horseshoe crabs at the tidepool petting zoo- Aomine privately suspected that Kise’s celebrity status alone prevented them from being booted from the establishment after that. Kuroko seemed entirely absorbed with observing the sea creatures, and stared deeply into their tanks for minutes at a time as Momoi read out facts and trivia from the informational posters on the wall. 

As for Kagami, he looked a bit like Aomine felt. Fish, marine mammals, and education in general held little appeal for either of the boys, and so they spent most of their time just shuffling around on the edges of the scene, waiting for the other three to tire of whatever they were looking at so that they could move into a new room and shuffle there. 

That is, until they entered the shark zone.

“Scary!” Kise yelled upon approaching the wall-sized tank. But he was laughing as he looked into it. “Look at all the _teeth!_ ”

“I have never seen so many dangerous predators in one room before,” Kuroko said, with relish. 

_You live with the most dangerous predator of them all, but you still say shit like that._ Aomine shook his head and glanced at Kagami, only to find that Kagami was looking right back at him.

Aomine redirected his attention to the tank, heart racing in what was probably rage. 

“My favorite shark is the shortfin mako shark,” Kuroko said, face already glued to the glass of the tank. One of the small sharks swam towards him. They maintained eye contact for a few long moments. “I’ve heard that some of them can swim at speeds in excess of 70 kilometers per hour. At my fastest, I can only sprint 19.1 kilometers per hour.”

“Ooh, let’s see if they have any of them here! You said it’s called a shortfin mako?” Momoi had located a sign that had a list of sharks by name and picture- she went over to this now and started to read aloud. “They have a great white, and a hammerhead, and a dogfish…”

She continued through the list, Kise joined Kuroko by the tank, and Aomine and Kagami just kind of stood there. Aomine had never heard of a shortfin mako shark in his life. This bothered him a little.

“Hey. Aomine.” Kagami’s gruff voice cut through Aomine’s musings. Annoyed, he looked over at the redhead. He was pointing at the tank, a childish grin stretched across his face. “That shark there and the one next to it. Which do you think would win in a fight?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions.” Aomine was prepared to just ignore him after that. But then Kagami’s smile had wavered, and Aomine had felt some weird compunction of guilt, and so he decided he might as well deign to offer him a response. It’s not like there was anything else to do, after all. “Obviously the one on the right would win. The other guy’s too big and awkward.”

Kagami shot him a look, one with the clear intention of questioning whether somebody with Aomine’s body type should make such an assessment. But before Aomine had time to get properly pissed at him, he continued. “Well yeah, the shark on the left’s bigger. But that means he’s tougher, that he can withstand a lot.”

“Tell me. What’s the point of being big and tough if you’re too slow to attack?”

“Maybe he’s big but also fast. He could be a shortfin mako, for all you know.”

The two of them were quiet for a moment, contemplating the sharks. 

“It’s kind of like…” Kagami began. “I dunno. It’s like the little shark’s a point guard and the big shark’s a center. Which one’s going to score more? Obviously the big shark.”

Aomine balled his fists. “Are you crazy? The other shark’s not that little. And he’s got a face like a stone-cold killer. Nah, I’d say he’s like a power forward or something. Either of us could beat a center in a one-on-one, no sweat. It’s like that.”

“He’d need to be a really good shot though, because he’s sure as hell not getting any of the rebounds-”

Kagami stopped short, face coloring, and all of the sudden Aomine realized that their conversation had somehow devolved into an appraisal of the basketball potential of sharks. 

Neither of them knew what to say for a moment. Aomine _still_ didn’t really know what to say when he began to speak, but he figured that if he didn’t break the silence, the mood between them would just get progressively more awkward until it reached a tipping point. “Maybe you’re right,” he muttered, looking anywhere but at his rival’s face. “But that smaller shark still looks like he knows a trick or two.”

Aomine would have been happy to never say another word to Kagami again after that embarrassment, but inevitably, the pair of them got bored again as soon as they made it to the next room. In this room the lights were low- it housed a variety of deep-sea creatures. 

“Hey, Aomine.” Kagami’s voice was back. And even though it was a voice that made Aomine want to punch things, he was just so damned _bored_ that he couldn’t help but listen to it. “That angler there or the viperfish next to it. Which do you think would win if they played one-on-one?”

Aomine snorted. At least now Kagami was asking the question that was really on his mind. “And people say _I’m_ obsessed with basketball.” 

A moment of eye contact. 

“The viperfish.”

“Definitely the angler.”

 

The rest of the afternoon proceeded in more or less the same way. Even though Kise was acting as he always did, really pouring on the unwanted physical contact and prying into details of their personal lives, his flamboyant antics hardly even made an impression on Kagami and Aomine. Instead, they were too caught up in an elaborate mental bracket pitting all of the creatures of the sea against one another. No animal, no matter how small, escaped their attention. A blue crab beat out a fiddler crab. A stingray swept the floor with a moray eel. A barnacle fell to a tunicate. And once the dust had settled and the group had sat down to dinner in a neighboring family restaurant, only two finalists remained: the larger shark from before (whose species had been positively identified as a “megamouth” earlier in the afternoon, when Kagami had sneaked away from the group under the guise of going to the bathroom), and a friendly trained dolphin named Tito. 

“You’re so fucking stupid. It makes my brain hurt sometimes.” Some of the ice in Aomine’s root beer had gotten stuck together. He swirled it around with a straw to break the mini glacier apart. “Between a shark and a dolphin- and not just a normal dolphin; one that jumps to incredible heights and plays with balls as a _career_ -”

Kagami sniggered at this. Aomine gritted his teeth and continued, struggling to keep his voice to an inconspicuous whisper. “-between these two, you still think that the shark would win.”

“You don’t understand. The dolphin has more skills, yeah, duh. But the shark has more determination. Eventually the dolphin will give up, but the shark won’t.”

“But how could a shark physically play basketball? Like, how the hell would it get the goddamn ball through the _hoop_?” Aomine didn’t know how to properly vent his frustration. He spun his straw even more forcefully. 

“Kagamicchiaominecchi!”

“Yah!”

The shock of Kise popping up right in the middle of their hushed conference was simply too much for Aomine’s glass of root beer. It had suffered any number of abuses over the past few minutes of its life, and it retaliated by spilling off the table, directly onto Aomine’s lap. 

Aomine looked from the wet spot spreading across his shorts up to the blonde, murder in his steely blue eyes. Kise gulped and backed away. “S-sorry, Aomine. My bad.”

“You’re damn right it’s your bad!” Aomine seethed. 

Kise took another step back. “I will, uh, I’ll change pants with you if you want.”

“Okay then. Get stripping.”

“Dai-chan!” Momoi, ever efficient, had already grabbed a stack of napkins from the canister and was bringing them over. She gave him a dirty look as she tossed them at his crotch. “If it bothers you so much, you can just go home now and change.”

Kagami’s head shot up. “But he can’t go home yet! We haven’t finished-”

Aomine raised an eyebrow at how blatantly he was overlooking that day’s primary mission, and that gesture alone seemed to freeze the words in his mouth. Abashed, the redhead looked down again, shuffling his feet. “Actually, yeah, it’d be a good idea to go. And you should be nicer to Kise, it wasn’t his fault.”

“Kagamicchi! I knew you cared!”

“Yeah, whatever,” Kagami said, still keeping his eyes focused anywhere but on Aomine.

Well, two could play at the “being nice to Kise” game, Aomine thought, as he began to dab at his pants withs the napkins. He took in a deep, fortifying breath. “Sorry Kise. Might’ve overreacted a little.” 

For some reason, it was that brief apology, rather than any of the contumely that Aomine had been heaping on him that afternoon, that made Kise’s smile start to slip. “Are you feeling okay, Aominecchi?” he asked, voice worried.

“I’m feeling fine. Just… let me go the bathroom a minute, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Do you need any more napkins?” 

“Didn’t I just say that I’m fine?” 

Without speaking another word, Aomine pushed his way through the crowd to the public restroom. 

It took some time, but with the help of a series of wet paper towels Aomine managed to get the worst of the stickiness off the front of his pants. He grudgingly had to admit that the damage could have been much worse if he had been wearing nice pants rather than his usual black basketball shorts. With a solemn vow that he would never dress up again, he exited the bathroom.

And ran straight into Momoi. “Satsuki, what the hell? Why aren’t you eating?”

“Thanks for not making a scene back there.” Momoi said. “Even though I think you just broke Ki-chan’s brain a little when you apologized.”

“Maybe that was the point.”

“ _Dai-chan_.” No matter how exasperated Momoi made herself look, though, Aomine knew that it was just an act. The rare occasions when she was truly mad at him were impossible to mistake. 

“Although I guess his brain was already a little broken,” Aomine mused.

“Stop pretending that the two of you aren’t friends. You’re just making yourself look stupid.” Momoi’s voice was a little muffled- she had bent down and started rummaging through her purse all of the sudden. “Ah, found it!” she said, drawing a small plastic bag out of it. The bag was covered with the imprint of numerous colored fish. 

“Aw, Satsuki.” Aomine groaned. “Don’t go to the damn _gift shop_. They really gouge you there, everything costs way too much.”

“I couldn’t help it! We were walking by, and I saw a little stuffed animal of that fish we found that looks like Tetsu-kun, so Ki-chan and I _had_ to go in and buy it! And then since I was already there I bought a bunch of other stuff.”

“Don’t say that like it’s a natural thing! Students without an income should learn self control.”

Momoi pouted. “Okay then. I won’t give you a present at all.” 

“Okay then. Don’t.”

Rolling her eyes, she thrust the bag into Aomine’s chest. “Just say thank you. It’s not anything expensive, after all.”

It didn’t look like Momoi was going to be swayed. Sighing, he took the bag and flipped it over, letting the contents fall into his large palm.

“It’s a shark!” Momoi bubbled. “I saw how much you liked them at the aquarium, so I thought I should get you one for your very own.”

It was indeed a shark. Or rather, a miniature plastic shark attached to a keyring. It bared its spiked teeth at Aomine in an expression of hostility. 

“You can put it on your basketball bag!”

“Uh, yeah. I’ll do that,” Aomine said, shoving the keyring into his pocket. He might get laughed off the court by his teammates if he did, but Momoi didn’t need to know. “Thanks, Satsuki.” 

“No problem!”

With a smile, she locked their elbows and led him back to their table. 

After dinner was over, Kise invited the other four of them back to his place “to play table games! Or watch a movie! Or whatever!” Kuroko declined, saying that he needed to submit an assignment by midnight that night, and once he’d made a decision nothing the other three could sway him. He even refused Aomine’s generous offer for Kagami to walk him home, so strong was the draw of his studies. 

Kise took Kuroko’s abandonment particularly hard, and so he squeezed him particularly hard in front of the restaurant when he was about to depart. “I had such a fun day! Keep in touch, Kurokocchi! I should be in Japan for a while now, I’m working on that new drama now like I told you, you know, where I have a cute puppy that looks kinda like Nigou…”

He would have kept chattering until the sun rose, so Momoi grabbed the back of his shirt and started hauling him bodily away. 

“Better make a break for it now, Tetsuya, while you still can,” Aomine heard Kagami mutter. 

“Wah, Momoicchi! This isn’t even the direction of my apartment, you know...”

Somehow, the diminished group made it to Kise’s place without any significant danger to life or limb. Due to the lateness of the hour, Kise only had to stop a handful of times: once to help a little old lady cross a street, twice to take pictures with giggling tweenaged fans, and once for free samples at an oden stand. 

“Finally, we made it!” Kise slumped against his door, shaking futilely at the doorknob. “Ahh, it’s been a long day. Where did I put my key?”

“You lost your key?” Kagami’s weird eyebrows bunched together for a moment. “That’s bad. When was the last time you saw it?”

“Uhhh I don’t know? A few days ago maybe? Actually, I don’t know if I’ve used it since I got back to Japan… let me think...”

And that was when the nervous feeling started to grow in Aomine’s stomach. He still didn’t 100% know what it was or how to articulate it, but it niggled at him all the same, and had something to do with how even an idiot like Kise would know to keep his door locked when he was out. He looked over at Momoi, hoping that she would somehow sense his feelings and be able to explain to him in the way she normally did. Unfortunately, for once she seemed oblivious to his stress. “Well, try and knock, at least. Maybe he’s at home.”

Maybe _he’s_ at home.

_Crap,_ Aomine thought, as the feeling intensified. _It’s a conspiracy, and Satsuki’s a part of it._

“Who’s ‘he’?” Kagami wondered. 

Aomine didn’t mean to exchange a worried glance with that red-headed idiot. He was just… the only one available right then. 

Kise took her advice, pounding on the door with all his might. “Sweetie, are you home? Open up, it’s meee!”

“Kise has a girlfriend now?” Aomine guessed. 

Momoi elbowed him in the ribs. “Don’t be dense. They’ve been going out for… how many years now? Two? You’ve met him like a hundred times.”

Again, his eyes met with Kagami’s. But this time, what they shared was a look of horror. “You don’t mean-”

“I know you’re home, I can hear the TV! Let me in!” He rattled the doorknob again for emphasis. 

A muffled shout came through the door. “I can’t believe you lost one of our keys. Remember what happened the last time? With your _stalker_? Get out of here before I come and kick you.”

“But Yukiocchiii…”

“This is is why we can never have children!”

“I’m willing to call it a tie if you are.” Kagami’s voice when he whispered in Aomine’s ear was distinctively higher pitched that normal. It sounded almost as scared as Aomine felt. 

“Yeah, fuck this.” Aomine grabbed Kagami’s elbow and jerked him toward the stairs. “See ya around, Satsuki.”

“Dai-chan! Kagamin! Where do you think you’re going?”

Aomine didn’t even bother looking back at her as he answered. “I don’t know about you, but hanging out in the doorway of Kise and Kasamatsu’s weird gay love nest was not part of my plan for tonight. Kagami and I are going home.”

“No, don’t go yet! I’m sorry, I’ll get the door open somehow!” 

“Allow me,” Momoi said, pulling a hair pin and her student ID card out of her wallet. “I can just pick it.” 

“God damn it, Satsuki,” Aomine muttered, knowing that she was too far away to hear. 

“She can pick _locks?_ ” Kagami said, throwing a glance over his shoulder. “Who _does_ that?” 

“She’s got to collect her data somehow. Take my advice and don’t think too much about it.”

“Huh.”

They were pleased to discover that Kise’s apartment was not too far away from their own. Deciding to just walk it rather than having to deal with the train, the two of them headed down the road. 

“Can’t wait to get home and shower,” was the first thing Kagami said after they were out of sight of Kise’s apartment.

“You’re one to talk. At least he didn’t spill soda on you. He just, you know, went in for the cuddle.”

“He also cuddled Tetsuya though. Would you call that an indirect cuddle?”

“Seriously, stop being such a girl.” 

After the residual weirdness from their day with Kise had faded away, the two managed to chat fairly normally for a while. And so naturally, their conversation returned to a subject very near and dear to their hearts: Megamouth-kun and Tito the Dolphin. 

Even after a whole evening’s worth of arguing, though, they were unable to come to a decision on who would win a game of one-on-one. Eventually, there was nothing else for it. They would have to get a third-party opinion.

So naturally, they chose to bother Kuroko while he was studying. 

“ _Hey. Tetsuya. Which would win in a basketball game, a huge badass shark or a flippy little dolphin?_ ”

“I think that’s what they call begging the question.”

“Shut up, Ahomine. I’m just telling it like it is.”

Although a little part of each of them had expected Kuroko to just ignore that text entirely, the blue-haired boy surprised them not only by responding at all, but by responding promptly. 

“ _The dolphin_. _More than likely._ ”

“See that, Kagami?” Aomine smirked as he looked down at the phone. “Tetsu’s not just a hot piece of ass; he’s got brains too.”

“At least he doesn’t have his brains _in_ his ass, like some people.” 

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Whatever.”

Aomine jammed his hands in his pocket, felt something crinkle there, got an idea. Grinning so hard that he thought his cheeks would rip from it, he pulled the bag Momoi had given him and held it out to Kagami. 

“Here. Present for you.”

Kagami snorted. “Why would I want a present from you?”

“Just open it, dumbass.”

Aomine pushed it into his face. Kagami sputtered and tried to shove it away, but Aomine persisted. “Just open it!”

“Fuck, Aomine, _okay._ Okay.”

Aomine handed the bag off and leaned back, crossing his arms as he watched Kagami pull out the shark keyring, look at it, and then shoot his rival an inquisitive glance. “The hell is this?”

“It’s a reminder,” Aomine said. 

“A reminder of what? Of my beautiful doki-doki first date with Aomine-chan? Ha, and you say that _I’m_ the girl.”

“No, _Bakagami_. It’s a reminder that, like this little shark here, you’ll never be the best.” Aomine leaned in and took the shark, holding it up next to Kagami’s face. He smiled at the resemblance there. “No matter what it is, whether it’s basketball or Tetsu or whatever, you’ll always come in second to me.”

Kagami grabbed the shark away from him.  “Thanks, then. I’ll keep this. Maybe it’ll be good for a laugh, once I’ve proven how wrong you are.”

His eyes glinted as they met Aomine’s, red and fiery. It was hard to look away from the intensity that he found there.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, this is the chapter where Kise finally makes an appearance. Sorry if I made him sound like too much of an airhead; it wasn't my intention x.x 
> 
> Also, thanks so much for all of the comments and kudos! It makes me feel super warm and fuzzy inside to think that other people are even reading what I wrote, much less enjoying it :)


	6. Trivial Pursuit

 

_“I’m very sorry, but I won’t be able to attend our run today. There is a problem with the plumbing in our apartment, and the ceiling has begun to leak. The damage is already considerable.”_

Momoi frowned down at her phone. She had been halfway through tying up her running shoes when it had beeped to notify her of a new text. Now, it didn’t seem liked she needed to finish lacing them at all.

“But I really wanted to run with Tetsu-kun today,” she told her phone, voice accusing. “Well, I want to run with him every day, that’s nothing new. But today has seemed especially long.”

There was no good explanation as to why today had been worse than any normal day. It wasn’t as if she’d had an exam, or gotten caught in bad weather, or been attacked by a bear. She _had_ overheard some girls in her program making suggestive remarks about why Momoi might only have male friends, but it wasn’t like that kind of thing could bother her- she’d been hearing it on a regular basis ever since the Teiko days. She did have to acknowledge that this unsolicited critique of her lifestyle was a bit more valid nowadays than it was then, back when she still retained a handful of females that she hung out with during class and on the weekends. But, other than that, nothing really substantial had changed over the years. She was still taking care of Aomine, and collecting stats for the team that she had grudgingly chosen to bless with her tactical genius, and being generally too busy to have time for even a tenth of the slutty misadventures her female classmates seemed to expect of her.

So, as she kept telling herself, there was no earthly reason for Momoi to feel so drained or anxious or lonely right then. But she did. And for some equally inexplicable reason, she knew that spending time with Kuroko, tucked in the trail of calm and quiet that had always followed him around, could make her feel better. 

But no, Kuroko’s ceiling had to be leaking. 

“ _Oh no! Do you need help with anything?_ ”

It took a few minutes for Kuroko to reply. Momoi didn’t bother to put on her other running shoe, but neither did she bother to kick off the one she already had on. Instead, she just stared at the wall for a while, counting the stripes in the wallpaper, being careful not to think of anything upsetting. 

When Kuroko responded, Momoi’s phone leapt back into her hand before the end of the first beep. “ _That won’t be necessary. I’ve already moved our belongings and furniture out of the splash zone._ ” Momoi smiled at his word choice, remembering their excursion to the aquarium the previous weekend. It was true that she hadn't seen Kise in person since his graduation, and so it had been nice to hear about what he was up to. Mostly he was working on his modeling and the same weekly teen drama that he'd been a regular in since his penultimate year of high school. However, now that he'd finished up school, his agent had been pushing him to diversify his efforts. Thus, the American film. Thus, the new TV series of his that was on the table. Thus, a distinct lack of free time in which to play basketball. 

Part of Momoi had been afraid that Kise would challenge Aomine to a game at some point during their aquarium excursion. The blonde didn't know about Aomine's injury, and sinceAomine thought he had had some kind of deep-rooted reputation to defend since the two had first met back at Teiko, Momoi couldn't imagine that situation ending well. But Kise hadn't said a word to Aomine about basketball. She supposed he had his own life now, was following dreams that had nothing to do with his former rival and inspiration.

Come to think of it, could that date have been when this current state of near-panic had started?

There were 7,412 stripes on the wall. She hadn't counted them all, but she had determined the pattern in the order of colors, and how many times this pattern fit beside a single laminate square on the floor, and the rest was easy from there. 

She should respond to Kuroko. 

Not knowing what to say but knowing that she needed to say something if she didn't want to start quantifying some new minutiae like she normally did whenever she felt bad like this (the threads in her sweater looked particularly fascinating at the moment), she tapped at her phone.

_"How big is the leak?"_

A few seconds. 

_"It is sizable."_

Something was not being said here, and since it was a mystery that even a normal person would be interested in, Momoi figured that it couldn't hurt to investigate it. She finally located her other running shoe and prepared herself to give Kuroko a visit. 

 

When she arrived at Kuroko and Kagami's apartment, flushed and sweaty from a more-or-less satisfying run-slash-train ride, nobody answered her knock. Momoi frowned at the door, confused. Hadn't Kuroko said that he was there, moving his and Kagami’s stuff around? 

She shot him a quick text and, when it wasn't instantly answered, returned to the steps. Aomine would probably be home at this hour. He may even be in a good enough mood to give her food, or beer, or just hang out with her like people were supposed to do on a Friday night. The trip cross town wouldn't have to be entirely wasted. 

However, when she reached the narrow staircase, she found her path impeded by a stack of futons wedged from wall to wall. And behind the futons, she found a Kuroko, trying his best to pull them upwards. 

"Ah, Momoi-san. Good afternoon." In order to ensure perfect enunciation for every syllable, he'd waited until he'd finished speaking to give a mighty tug on the topmost of the futons. It crawled forward a couple of centimeters before the friction overcame it. 

Momoi hid a smile, the first genuine one that she'd had all day. "I thought you said you didn't need help with anything." 

"I don't."

It was hard to respond to that kind of stubbornness. Instead of saying anything, therefore, Momoi just pulled the top futon off of the lower one and squished the sides together, folding it together hamburger style. Kuroko frowned but didn't stop her. "Here. You take this one, and I'll take the other one. Nobody can carry two at once."

"Kagami-kun did, when we were moving in."

"Nobody with normal-lengthed arms can carry two at once."

Now that they had figured out the "how" of moving the futons upstairs, Momoi started to wonder about the "why". Fortunately, Kuroko got her up to speed before she even had to ask. 

"As I said before, the leak is very large," he began. "The splash zone is in fact our whole apartment, other than the kitchen and bathroom. I have decided that I would prefer not to sleep in the kitchen or bathroom."

"Ah, that makes sense." Momoi grunted as she readjusted the futon in her arms. It just wasn't right, how an object so light and soft to sleep in could be so awkward and unwieldy to transport. "So the two of you are moving up to Aomine's room? I'm surprised he agreed to that, him and Kagami being how they are."

"Aomine has his faults, but I'm convinced he wouldn't hesitate to help a friend in need." Kuroko smiled. "It is also possible that I haven't yet told him about this plan." 

Momoi laughed, imagining how Aomine's face would look when the object of his obsessive affections showed up at his doorstep, futon in hand, demanding a sleepover. It would be priceless. Clearly she had made the right decision when she'd come to the apartment. "You have no shame, Tetsu-kun. Aomine never lets anyone sleep in his place. Even the cute girls that he brings home."

"He lets you stay over," Kuroko reasoned. "Momoi-san is cutest girl that I know, probably."

Ordinarily, Momoi would have interpreted that comment as a pickup line and stressed out about it. But since it was Kuroko, she just smiled and thanked him. 

"Although I doubt that Aomine sees you as a girl. You're more like a parent to him. Or sometimes a troublesome sibling."

Momoi mock-glared at Kuroko. "You should have quit while you were ahead, Tetsu-kun."

They had finally reached Aomine's door. Momoi managed to shimmy it open using just her elbow, and they burst across the threshold. "Dai-chan! Want to have a play date with Tetsu-kun?"

In a flash, Aomine was in front of them, confusion and a hint of something like panic in his expression. "Satsuki, what the hell? Don't just invite people to my apartment."

"Tetsu-kun invited himself! It’s not my fault!”

She kicked her shoes off and tried to push past Aomine. He stepped to the side, preventing her from passing. Thinking at first that this was just a coincidence, she tried the other side, but he shifted his weight subtly to block her again. 

“Any chance you can do a vanishing drive while holding a futon?” Momoi muttered to Kuroko, who hadn’t even managed to get through the doorway yet. 

“Not against Aomine-kun.” Though he said this as if it were a matter of fact, Momoi knew without looking that Aomine was interpreting it in whatever perverted way he wanted to. “Why aren’t you inviting us in? Are you hiding something sordid?”

“No!” The response came too quickly, and Momoi narrowed her eyes. Either Aomine had a girl over (which was unlikely considering the sloppiness of his dress), or this was another Springtime Cup thing. 

"Is Kagamin here?" she wondered next.

"Absolutely not!"

But by the affronted way in which Aomine contorted his face upon hearing that, Momoi recognized that her guess had hit the mark. 

"Hm. I had thought that he was still at the school, studying. But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This is Kagami-kun we're talking about.”

"Hey! What are you trying to say, Kuroko?" 

The red-headed giant appeared behind Aomine at the door, and Aomine looked at him intensely, as if trying to communicate something by telepathy and utterly failing. Momoi supposed that their friendship was not yet strong enough for that kind of unspoken communication. Or it could be that they were both just idiots. 

"And wait, why do you have our _futons_?"

"There is a leak in our apartment. I texted you about it several times over the past hour." 

Confused, Kagami fished his phone out of the pocket of his gym shorts and looked down at it. "Huh. I guess so."

"And all this time, you were just up here hanging out with Aomine-kun. What were you even doing?" Kuroko wondered.

Although Aomine had to know how obvious the lie was, he delivered it without the slightest hesitation. "We were playing basketball and stuff." 

"Someday you'll have to teach me how to play basketball inside a house. It sounds like a lot of fun." Kuroko looked over at Kagami again, a frown on his face. "Kagami-kun. Because you didn't help me carry the futons, you have to put Nigou on his leash and bring him up here." 

"Hey!" Aomine cut in at this point, disturbed, possibly, by how Kagami had started moving toward the door, ready and willing to follow any of Kuroko's weird orders without question. "My apartment is not a goddamned hotel! You can't just bring your dog and all your stuff up here without asking!"

Kuroko looked over at him, blue eyes unblinking, and Momoi could see Aomine start to squirm. "But Aomine-kun is our friend, and we have nowhere else to go."

The look on Aomine's face right then, a sort of rapture mixed with self-loathing, was priceless. Momoi wished, not for the first time, that taking pictures of her friends without permission was a socially acceptable activity. But unfortunately there were some boundaries that she could not cross, even in the name of data collection. 

Aomine finally sighed and spoke again. "Whatever. Just don't make a habit out of it. How long do you think your place’ll take to get fixed?"

"I have no idea. Hopefully not too long. In the meantime, thank you very much for allowing us over. To make it up to you, I'm sure that Kagami-kun would be happy to cook for the next few days."

"Oi!"

Kuroko looked over at Kagami, oblivious to his complaints. "Please hurry up and get Nigou. I am sure he feels very lonely and left out at the moment. And while you're down there, you can pick up the small suitcase of necessities I packed and bring it up here."

"Does it look like I have space for all of your god-damned _necessities_?" Aomine grumbled.

Kuroko blinked. "I think you'll have space for these necessities," he said mildly. "After all, one of the things I packed is a host present for you."

Aomine just crossed his arms and looked away. However, he did finally grant Momoi and Kuroko entrance into his apartment, which Momoi supposed was a small step forward.

Momoi walked in, flopped the futon she carried into a pile with its twin in an out-of-the-way corner of Aomine's living area, and cast her eyes around for signs of anything that may be related to the Springtime Cup. However, the perpetual pigsty-ness of Aomine's apartment made it difficult to tell if anything was out of the ordinary. It didn’t take a genius to note that Aomine and Kagami had just been sitting on the couch- there were two half-drained bottles of beer dripping sweat on the coffee table in front of it (Momoi ran over to put them on coasters, browbeating Aomine noisily all the while), and Kagami's backpack and coat lay strewn across one of the armrests. However, the two of them seemed to have swept away any incriminating evidence that may or may not have existed a minute before.

While Momoi dug through the drawers on Aomine's end table in search of coasters, she took the liberty of peeking into Kagami's backpack for further clues. She was disappointed to find nothing but a textbook and a bunch of loose papers at first glance. Maybe sometime later, when Aomine wasn’t crossing his arms and pouting at her from the kitchen, she would be able to get a better look.

Eventually Kagami made it back, Kuroko's suitcase and a slightly damp Nigou in tow, and the four of them settled down in Aomine's living room. 

"So. What are we supposed to do now?" Aomine wondered. "I guess Tetsu's going to study, like normal, but the rest of us-"

"I don't want to study. I want to learn how to play basketball inside a house." Kuroko looked over at Kagami. "Since apparently that’s what you and Aomine-kun were doing before we all arrived. Please don't stop on our account."

"If it were possible to play basketball inside, don't you think you and I’d be doing that in _our_ apartment? Like, nonstop?" Kagami pointed out. He shook his head. "Aomine's an idiot. Don't listen to what he says."

Aomine had been trying to silence Kagami with a look ever since he’d started speaking. Once again, his telepathy failed miserably. 

Momoi smirked. "Dai-chan! How could you lie to Tetsu-kun and I like that? You're terrible!"

"Shut up, Satsuki! I didn't mean we were playing basketball. Just that we were, you know... doing basketball stuff." 

Kagami nodded. "Yeah, there was a game on TV. We were watching it." 

"Oh, I see. Well, feel free to turn it back on if you’d like," Kuroko pressed. 

"It's, uh..." Aomine began.

"It's over."

Aomine’s nod in response to that was probably a bit more vigorous than it strictly needed to be. "Right, like Kagami says. It's over now."

Any more teasing, Momoi cautioned herself, and Aomine might get mad for real, and maybe even kick her out of his apartment. And since she knew that it was an exceptionally poor time for her to be at home alone (even now she could hear train horns howling in the distance, and was having trouble fighting the urge to block everything else out and spend the night using those sounds to calculate how many meters per second each one was going), she decided to relenta bit. "Okay guys, whatever you say. But hey, Tetsu-kun, didn’t you say you’d gotten a host gift for Aomine?”

“Pretty sure that was just a lie to get Aomine agree to this.”

“Shut up, Bakagami. As if I need an incentive to be nice to Tetsu.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

Meanwhile, Kuroko was looking out the window. "I guess it's not too early to break something like that out. It _is_ past sundown, after all."

Predictably, the two other boys stopped arguing immediately upon hearing this. "You brought this guy _alcohol_? Are you trying to make him suck more than usual or something?"

Kuroko stood up and walked over to his suitcase, which was sitting on top of the futons. Nudging Nigou aside (spoiled as the little dog was, he thought nothing of claiming the stack of mattresses for his own), he began to zip it unhurriedly. "Kagami-kun isn't making any sense. Weren't you and Aomine-kun drinking beers earlier?" 

Kagami sputtered. "That's different though! That's not, you know, dangerous..."

"Says the person who has a habit of jumping too high and literally getting stuck in basketball hoops while intoxicated."

“That only happened twice!”

Although normally Momoi thought it was funny to watch how easily Kuroko won arguments, for some reason she was having trouble caring about the one that currently raged around her. Maybe she was tired. Or maybe the prospect of drinking when she was in this state scared her a little. That train whistle in the distance was still calling out to her. It piqued a fascination that she knew could not be considered healthy or adaptive, and she wanted to have all of her wits about her while she fought it. But in the same way that she was losing her willpower to resist it right then, she wasn't sure that she had the strength to go against what the rest of the group was doing. If they started drinking, she knew that she would join in too.

Which was why, when Kuroko pulled out a container of ice cream from his suitcase, rather than a bottle or a handle or whatever else she may have subconsciously been expecting, Momoi couldn't help but sigh in relief. 

"Satsuki, what the hell is that?" Aomine wondered. 

"My name is Kuroko. This is some ice cream that I bought. It's vanilla flavored." As usual, Kuroko's explanations didn't really explain anything. But Momoi couldn't fault him for that right then. 

"Is it alcoholic?"

"No." Kuroko had brought it over to the kitchen counter and was now busy rifling through the drawers and cabinets. "I bought it at the normal grocery store a few days ago. I had been planning to try making my own vanilla milkshakes, because the ones from Maji Burger have an extortionately high price and I am approaching bankruptcy at the moment. Since we're all together now, it seems like a good time for a first attempt."

As soon as Momoi caught his drift, she joined him in the kitchen. With the ease of a practiced house mother (because Kuroko had been right earlier; what Aomine and her had really did border on a mother-son relationship sometimes), she located a spoon, a few mismatched glasses, and the blender that Aomine used sometimes to make protein shakes. "That sounds like agreat idea, Tetsu-kun! I've never made my own milkshake before. I'm going to put in extra ice cream."

"I plan to do the same. Thick shakes are the best." Kuroko took the proffered spoon, scooped out some ice cream, and gave a tentative nibble of the edge.

"It tastes good. Here, Kagami, have a bite." He held the spoon over to the redhead, who had followed them into the kitchen and was busy rinsing out the blender. Once Kagami had given it a lick and nodded his approval, Kuroko continued. "I think I made an excellent decision as far as host gifts go."

"Don't pretend that this is a host gift. You just got ice cream because you wanted it," Aomine said, although his voice sounded a little distracted. Momoi looked at him questioningly, but he just looked away. It wasn't until he brought a hand up to rub the back of his neck that she noticed that he was blushing. She guessed that made sense though. She herself wasn't blind to how cute Kuroko was being right then, and she wasn't even in love with him. "But hey, Tetsu... remember how you told me you were working on a new type of misdirection? What's that all about?"

Kuroko raised an eyebrow. "Why do you ask?” 

Okay, Momoi had seen Aomine blush before, but she had never seen him look so downright nervous. Balance and effortless grace was his _thing_ , the Aomine she knew did not... shift his weight from foot to foot, or anything stupid like that. What on earth was going on?

“Are you doing it now?”

“No. Right now, I am too full of childlike joy to be thinking about such things."

“Are you sure?”

"I’ve been watching, and he hasn’t disappeared at all..." Momoi remarked, interested to parse out the story. She looked over at Kagami. "At least I think? Kagamin, have you been able to see Kuroko this whole time?" 

Kagami looked funny when he was confused. Something to do with the eyebrows, she supposed. "I guess so. Haven't really been paying attention."

"But that's what misdirection is, isn't it?" Aomine leapt back in, speaking quickly. "It means that Tetsu can control what people are paying attention to. So like, instead of seeing him going for the vanishing drive, they're off looking at like Kagami or whatever."

Kuroko and Kagami exchanged glances. "Well, yes. That has been one of our fundamental techniques since the beginning. When Kagami-kun is standing on the court, he has a strong presence. It makes it easier for me to move undetected in his shadow." 

"So if that’s your old move, then what’s your new one?”

Kagami, visibly bothered by Kuroko’s matter-of-fact dissection of their style, cut in at that point. “Aomine, just shut up. You're not making any sense. And besides, you should know by now that Kuroko doesn't show off his new moves until he’s got them almost perfect.”

“At least as far as basketball is concerned.” Kuroko gave a slight nod and then began to examine the container of ice cream once again, dropping a few experimental scoops into the rinsed-out blender. “But in the case of making a milkshake for the first time, I will certainly depend on all of your advice and support throughout the creative process…”

 

Two blender explosions, one Nigou invasion, several broken and hastily mended friendships, and four vanilla shakes of various quality and consistency later, the group was finally able to retire to the living area. Well, all of the group except for Kagami, who had been volunteered to stay and clean up the kitchen. 

( _Why does it have to be_ me _?_ he had grumbled. _Kuroko’s the one that made the mess._

_But Tetsu-kun’s not tall enough to clean the splatter-marks off the ceiling…_

Kagami had to concede that she had a point.)

The milkshake which Momoi had made was pretty good. Kagami, who had worked at a snack stand during his middle-school summers in L.A., had taught her a trick about grinding up a little ice in the blender before adding the milk and ice cream. The resulting texture was interesting. She would have to experiment with different amounts of ice and coarsenesses of grind. Tables and data sheets started to blossom in her head, so many and so detailed that she had already begun to worry about how she would color-code them.

And then Aomine’s voice brushed them away. “So Satsuki,” he drawled. “To thank me for being such a gracious host, Tetsu just made me dessert and Kagami’s cleaning my house. Makes me wonder what you’ve got to offer.”

Momoi raised an eyebrow. “What have I got to _offer_? Dai-chan, I’ve been putting up with you for 18 years. There is not even a tiny chance you could have survived adolescence without my help.”

“She has a point there. I have only been around a fraction of that time and have found it exhausting.” Kuroko swirled his milkshake and took a sip. “Ah. Vanilla-y.”

“Hey! I’m not _that_ bad!” 

Once it became clear that nobody was going to chime in and agree with him, Aomine slumped back on the couch, forehead crinkled. "I can't believe you guys. If you hate me so much, why are you even here?"

"I never said that I hate you," Kuroko pointed out. "I was just agreeing with Momoi-san that you are already greatly in her debt."

Aomine just looked at his shoes.

"For the record though," came a voice from the kitchen. "I never said that _I_ didn't hate you."

"Give it a rest, Kagamin!" Momoi said. She had intended to sound frustrated. However, that was a little hard to do considering that she _wasn't_ actually frustrated, that figuring out Aomine and Kagami's weird new relationship was one of  the few projects in her life that filled her with curiosity rather than dread at the moment. "You come to Dai-chan's house literally _all the time_ , even when Tetsu-kun isn't here. Why can't you just admit that you're friends?"

"We are friends," Aomine said. "Just, you know. The kind of friends that hate each other."

Momoi rolled her eyes. "Nope, I'm not buying it. Only girls are friends with people that they hate. Are you saying that you're girls?"

"I mean, I can't speak for Kagami..."

"Hey!"

The bickering continued for a few minutes longer, until out of the blue Aomine started yelling at Kuroko for using his new misdirection trick again. This outburst was then followed by a second one once Aomine realized that Momoi had never satisfactorily answered his request fora host gift. According to him, he had already made up for all of the services rendered to him in middle and high school by helping her develop her gift for predictive statistics. He didn't go into detail about _how_ exactly he had done this, other than to say that it had become inevitable once he had reached the elite level and started to require an elite-level support system. Momoi smiled inwardly at this- only Aomine could believe that he was doing a favor to someone by letting them bend over backwards to help him.

Whether or not his claim was valid, Aomine continued to press until Momoi finally relented. She obviously hadn't brought him anything, but as long as she had her nature and her data, Momoi would never truly be empty-handed. Midorima's new cell phone number (he had changed his old one at the end of high school for the express reason of throwing the rest of his middle school friends off of his trail) proved to be a sufficient offering, and the four of them started off the night by assaulting him with the stupidest stream of prank calls that they could possibly conceive of. 

Aomine pretended to be from his neighborhood watch, investigating the theft of a pink bicycle (the previous days’s lucky item for Cancers) and making it clear that Midorima was their top suspect. 

Kagami pretended to be a firefighter, informing him that his current apartment had just been condemned as a firetrap and that he would need to relocate within the next four days for his own safety. 

And to Momoi fell the heavy burden of impersonating Oha Asa, who was making routine thank-you calls to her most dedicated fans. Momoi believed that she had pulled off this role with grace and poise. Midorima seemed to have a different opinion of this, but since Momoi could hear Takao laughing in the background, she assumed that her attempt couldn't have been _entirely_ miserable.

Once Midorima had had enough and blocked all four of their cell phone numbers, the night devolved into TV-watching, basketball-discussing, and another round of milkshakes. It was very late by the time they settled down to sleep. 

And it was even later by the time Momoi _actually_ slept. 

Normally Momoi just crashed on the floor in Aomine's room whenever she stayed over. He kept a futon for guests in his closet, so it was easiest just flop it down in the ground and not bother about moving it into another part of the house. However, now that Kuroko and Kagami were in the mixture, certain standards of propriety had to be upheld. This meant that Momoi was booted into the living area, while Kuroko and Kagami squeezed their over-large futons next to Aomine's bed. Thus, a "girl's room" and a "guy's room". 

This struck Momoi as a little redundant, considering that all of the guys in the "guy's room" were confirmed homosexuals, but whatever. She supposed it was the principle of the thing that mattered. And it certainly did help her out with a certain fact-finding mission that had been niggling her brain since earlier that day.

_Kagami-kun's backpack,_ she thought, as she flicked on her cell phone's flashlight. _If they were doing Springtime Cup stuff, maybe there will be evidence of it in there._

And it was just her luck that Kagami had left his bag right where it had been since her and Kuroko's arrival, slumped on the floor against the side of Aomine's couch. Silently, she shimmied the zipper open and slipped a hand inside. 

The contents weren't impressive at first glance. One physiology book, with a picture of some guy with an 80’s haircut playing soccer on the front. A couple of old homework assignments, written in a messy hand but with surprisingly not-terrible grades on them. A couple of loose pens, crushed andmangled at the bottom. However, things took a turn for the interesting once she opened up the smaller outer pocket. 

One notebook, a blue one, that looked uncannily familiar. And when she snuck a peek inside the front cover, the little loose piece of paper inside looked familiar as well.

Momoi smiled an evil little smile. _Jackpot._

After a moment of silence, during which she noted two distinct pitches of snore from the next room (Kagami and Aomine, she presumed- everyone knew that shadows didn't snore, which was helpful because it didn't really matter whether Kuroko was awake anyway), Momoi gathered her courage and slipped the notebook out of the bag and onto the coffee table. She unfolded the paper in the front cover and found that yes, it was the same list she had photographed before, although it was at least twice as long now, with a good handful of new bullet points. She squinted and adjusted the light from her phone in order to read.

_Darn it,_ she thought, as the words came into focus. _This time, they really_ did _put it in code._

Because there was no way that she could be expected to take titles like “amount of time taken to get Tetsu to smile”, “who can use their sexiness to get more d#g#ts from hot guys”, and “putting up with Kise (+ Aomine’s idiotic dolphin basketball delusions)” at face value. Their challenges had been a little weird before, but these were a whole new level of wtf. For a moment, Momoi was worried that her efforts to decode Aomine’s handwriting over the past few weeks had missed the mark and that the words written on the paper actually meant something entirely different, but a part of her knew it wasn’t that. The explanations after each challenge fit the context too well for her to be mistaken.

_I mean, I guess they fit the context, in that they explain in a precise and specific way why neither of them won each of the challenges. It doesn’t explain why both of their stats are so low._ Because, Momoi had to admit, she could easily have wiped the floor with them at any of those games.Phone numbers from attractive men seemed to come her way without any effort expended on her part, she had stayed with Kise and Kasamatsu until the wee hours of the morning that one night when Aomine and Kagami had fled like startled kittens, and, although her statistics on Kuroko had never included the frequency of various facial expressions, she was sure that she saw him smile more than once every 4 days, 7 hours, and 31 minutes. Whatever Kagami and Aomine were trying to do, they were hopelessly incompetent at it. 

She folded the paper back up again. The mystery just kept getting deeper.

When she tried to return it to the cover of the journal it had been in before, however, she accidentally dislodged another set of papers from where they had been wedged into the binding of the journal. She couldn’t help but see the title on top of them while she collected them up from the floor: “Random trivia about Tetsuya that any good ~~ boyfriend~~ sex partner would know.”

And then everything clicked.

Momoi sat back on her heels- hard.

_This is all a Kuroko thing._ The thoughts were like a soft breeze on the outer edge of a hurricane- clear, rational, foreboding. _All along, the Springtime Cup must have been some sort of competition to see who can… who can_ have _him or whatever. The way that Daiki feels for him- I knew it, it must be the same way for Kagami. I wonder if Tetsu-kun knows._

She paused for a moment.

_I wonder if Tetsu-kun_ needs _to know._

On the one hand, she felt that she owed Kuroko honesty. If not because he had been part of the “figuring-out-what-the-Springtime-Cup-conspiracy-is” taskforce from the beginning, then simply because he would find out anyway. Kuroko didn’t need repeated trials or online research to figure things out in the way that Momoi did- just the flicker of an expression across a person’s face, the sound of their breathing, or their posture as they walked was enough information for him to go on. Sometimes she was able to get lies to work on him- he seemed to accept her longstanding fake crush on him as a fact, probably because it was indeed rooted in some flavor of genuine love- but she had the feeling it wouldn’t work this time. 

On the other hand, a video was playing behind her eyes of that one day back in Teiko, the morning after they had won nationals during their third and final year. The two of them had been squished together in a too-small bus seat some five or seven rows back from Aomine, and initially she’d thought that Kuroko had fallen asleep, head leaning on the frosty window. But then she’d heard him sigh.

_“Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, if I’d been born a person instead of a shadow.”_

Momoi hadn’t known what to make of that remark, so she’d responded with something lighthearted and dumb and entirely inappropriate. All the same, it had stuck with her. She had pondered it throughout the weeks and months to come, when Kuroko resigned from the team, and slipped out of her life, and reappeared suddenly in the foreground of some unknown and irrelevant high school’s basketball club. Still a shadow, but now learning how to be a person too, how to find the strength to shape his own life into whatever he needed it to be.

Kuroko had worked so hard for so many years to become what he was. It didn’t seem fair, that Aomine and Kagami could be trying to force his future on him. 

Momoi shoved the notebook back into Kagami’s bag. It was a decisive movement- she was so _done_ with thinking about the Springtime Cup- but not a resolute one. Sometimes even Momoi would come across a problem that she didn’t have enough data to untangle. Maybe this was one of those times. 

 


	7. Drinking games

After several days of stress and worry about his own sanity, Aomine had finally figured out what Kuroko’s new misdirection technique was. 

And he was _pissed_ the _fuck_ off about it.

"It’s weird as hell! I feel personally violated by it! And worst of all, I don't see how it gives you any advantage on the court that you didn't have before!"

"Aomine-kun, please keep your voice down. You're disturbing the other customers."

"Fuck the other customers!"

"Aomine-kun, that kind of language is not appropriate in a family restaurant. Think of the children."

Going out to dinner was not something that he and Kuroko usually made a habit of, as evidenced by Aomine's less-than-sparkling table manners. However, that evening they really hadn't had a choice. It seemed that Kagami had been working on an exercise physiology project for the past week and hadn't been able to cook meals for the house like he usually did. A normal roommate would have been able to take this abandonment in stride and find a way to sustain himself for a few days. But since Kuroko was Kuroko, he had decided that the better option would be to just stop eating everything except for milkshakes. 

When Aomine had come to visit earlier that day, this state of affairs had understandably horrified him. And so he had immediately grabbed the smaller boy by the arm and dragged him to the nearest restaurant, coaxing him with grumbled promises of protein and friendship and that everything would be Aomine's treat.

"And as I said before, it’s possible that you’re confused about my new technique. I don't think it's weird or a violation at all. Really, it's kind of beautiful."

_Are you kidding me? You really think that messing with my confidence by making me think and obsess about my opponents 24/7 is something that I would_ like _?_ That description couldn't miss the mark more if it tried.

At first, Aomine hadn't even believed that Kuroko could be responsible for something so downright creepy. Yeah, his former teammate had admitted that some of his old plays were centered around making the guy that was marking him look at Kagami rather than the ball, filling their senses with the power forward’s presence for the space of a brief but damning second. And again, yeah, his new technique was pretty much the same thing as that- except that now he couldn't stop thinking of Kagami _for even a goddamned second_ , and he hadn't even _played_ basketball for like a month now! 

The beginning of Kuroko's experiment had been subtle. At the aquarium, Aomine had thought that Kagami had kept on catching his attention simply because there was nothing else of interest there. It obviously wasn’t as if Kagami was the only person he'd been out with that day, but the other three of them had all been so focused on each other that he and his rival had been forced to hang out by default. Or so he had thought. 

He didn't begin to speculate that there might have been another reason behind Kagami's sudden rush for real estate in his brain until that night with the homemade vanilla shakes. At the beginning of that little… incident, the sight of Kuroko in his doorway, wearing indoor clothes and holding a futon, had pretty much killed Aomine. Made him become soft and mushy with desire and pining and other Kuroko-exclusive emotions, the way he always did. He had braced himself for a frustrating night. 

But then for some reason, his traitor eyes had spent the next several hours searching for Kagami, and seeing nobody else. Even when he'd slept, Kagami had been in his dreams, continuing to bitch at him about the Tetsu Trivia Challenge or whatever game they had been playing that day. Aomine refused to accept that, though. He did his best to chalk those weird nightmares up to the fact that Kagami had been sleeping right next to him on the floor, and in doing so had found a passable way to continue with his normal life.

When the visions kept coming even in Kagami’s absence, however, even when it had been literally _days_ since they had seen each other or exchanged even a single word, Aomine began to understand just how deeply Kuroko had screwed him over. 

Because unlike before, the way he was thinking about Kagami had nothing to do with basketball, or their rivalry, or the memory of losing to Seirin, or any other types of intimidation tactics that it might possibly make sense for Kuroko to practice evoking in his opponents. No, now his treacherous head was full of Kagami walking with him side-by-side on their way back from Kise's apartment, of red basketball shoes sitting in a messy pile by the side of Aomine's door, of Kagami smiling like it was his responsibility to light up the goddamned sun.

If Kuroko could find anything beautiful about this situation, Aomine would love to hear it. Because when searching on his own, the silver lining escaped him.

"If you think that mind-raping people is beautiful, then maybe you're right." Aomine shook his head, pushing around the chicken on his plate without attempting to eat it. "I still wish that you would keep it on the court though. Rather than experimenting on your friends at random times without even asking them first."

"If I'd asked you first, then I would have had to explain the trick. I don't want to tip my hand before I need to." 

"So you admit that you're using me as a guinea pig. Me, your best friend. The person who supported you and taught you to shoot and got your sorry ass onto the best middle school basketball team that Japan has ever seen."

“That last one was Akashi-kun.”

"Do you think Akashi would have looked at you twice, if I hadn't been friends with you first?" 

"Maybe."

That was as good as he was going to get out of Kuroko, Aomine reckoned. And so he abandoned that train of conversation in preference for the one that they'd been having earlier, about Kuroko's misdirected efforts to play God. 

"So, now that you know that this new technique of yours is working, can you stop practicing it on me? Or at least switch it to somebody other than Kagami?”

Kuroko cocked his head to the side. If Aomine hadn't been up to speed on that whole Kuroko-not-having-visible-emotions thing, he would have said that he looked puzzled. Or at least pensive. "So it didn't work, when I tried to use Momoi-san? That's interesting. I would have said that she had a lot of presence. She is a very charming person."

"Hey, don't do weird things to Satsuki in your head!"

"I assure you, my head is treating Momoi-san with the utmost respect," Kuroko assured him, his voice shimmering with innocence. "Unlike yours, my definition of 'charm' has nothing to do with a person's bra size.”

"Tetsu!"

Kuroko just smiled and returned to his milkshake. And when Aomine continued to press him about his new technique and, more specifically, when the effects would wear off, the smaller boy refused to say another word on the matter.

 

Things continued to get worse instead of better over the next few days, despite Aomine's efforts to avoid all contact with Kagami. Every morning, the first thing he saw upon waking up were red eyes, glinting with _something or other_ beneath weirdly bifurcated eyebrows. The days tended to go downhill from there. 

On Friday he decided that he was not going to put up with it anymore. He grabbed a 24-pack of beer after practice (where he had been embarrassing himself for more than a few hours doing zero-impact drills in the pool) and headed straight home, promising himself that he would drink until the color red was eliminated entirely from his world's palette. Or until he passed out in a drunken haze. Whichever came first. 

However, Aomine had forgotten to take into account his utter lack of experience with drinking alone, and how for once he would not be able to rely on Momoi or Kuroko or whoever was around to keep him from doing stupid things. 

Five beers later:

_bakagami. it's bagel like 2 fucking weeks, get got ass up here for a challenge_

And since Aomine's luck had been steadily declining ever since his injury, Kagami was both able to read through his phone’s autocorrect function and willing to do as he demanded. 

"Shit, Aomine. I could tell you'd probably been drinking, but you are _shitfaced_. It's almost not even funny."

Aomine glared at Kagami as he walked into the apartment, at how he deposited those fucking basketball shoesin their usual spot by the door. Everything Kagami did pissed him off. Especially when what he did was stay away from Aomine for weeks on end. "You're the one who came up here. You can leave any time."

Kagami cracked a smile. "I said it _almost_ wasn't funny. Only almost. Like hell I'm missing this." He walked over to where Aomine was half sitting, half reclining on the couch, grabbing a can of beer from the kitchen on the way in. He popped the tab open and took a large swig. 

"Who said you could drink my beer?"

"Oh, shut up, Ahomine. Like you ever get anything other than the cheap stuff anyway.” Kagami flopped himself onto the couch beside Aomine, propping his feet up on the coffee table before continuing. “Seems like you should be able to afford better, being a big-shot basketball player now, but whatever.”

“Ha. So what’s _your_ salary, again?”

Kagami raised an eyebrow. “Are you kidding me? I get to go to school and play basketball every day for four years without paying a dime. Once I’m done, I’ll have a degree anda good solid backup plan for what I’ll do if I, I dunno, break something and can’t play anymore. I think I’ve got it pretty good.”

“But you have to go to _school_. And like, take tests and study things. You can’t tell me that’s worth it,” Aomine pointed out, wrinkling his nose. 

"At least I'm giving it a try. That's more than you can say." Kagami had been looking Aomine in the face before. Now he was just looking at his beer. "Ever wondered what it would have been like, if you'd gone with college ball instead? Maybe you could have been on Tetsuya and my team. Wouldn't that have been a riot?"

If Aomine had been a bit more sober right then, a bit more aware of his surroundings, he might have been able to detect a note of sadness in Kagami's voice. As things were, however, his head was floating and his body was sinking and Kagami's words were nothing more than some kind of neutral sound wave that he could hardly even understand, let alone interpret the nuances of. 

"Tetsu wouldn't've let that happen. Our team would’ve been too good. Like Teiko all over again." He grimaced. "And I wouldn't have let that happen either, because I don't want Tetsu to go back to hating me."

A snort of laughter. "Yeah, that would suck. I can't imagine fucking up so much that even my best friend hated me.”

Lightning flashed across Aomine's brain, and he grit his teeth, trying not to let on how much that jab had hurt. "Just shut up. You have no idea what happened back then."

"Tetsuya told us about nationals your third year. How you guys played against his childhood friend, and made a fool out of him."

"That was just the tip of the iceberg, Bakagami," Aomine said, with as much levity as possible. At the same time, he tried to fight back an onslaught of memories from the night after that game. Out of respect for Kuroko he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t think back on them, but he couldn't _help_ it right then, right then when he was drinking with his enemy and having a crisis of identity and thinking about everything that he wanted and was beginning to believe that he would never have, all of the pale skin and little noises and nerve impulses and redemption. 

He took a deep, steadying breath. Maybe drinking all that alcohol had been counterproductive. But it was too late now to do anything about it. 

His next question slipped out of his mouth before he had a chance to stop and think about it.

"So tell me, Kagami. What is it about Tetsu that you’re so in love with? Why are you going through all this shit with me to have him?"

Kagami seemed visibly relieved to be back on familiar ground again. "If you don't understand what's so great about Tetsuya, then why are we even doing this? I won't lose to that kind of half-hearted love."

"Tch. Obviously I have my own reasons for wanting Tetsu. I just wanted to know what yours are, that's all."

Kagami rolled his eyes. "Whatever, Aomine. But, hmm, my big reason for loving Tetsuya..." He paused to think for a moment, eyes sweeping across the uneven plaster ceiling. "I guess it's because he's a challenge, you know? It's tough to know what he's doing, or thinking,because he's a kind of secretive guy. But in those moments when I do figure it out and can get totally in sync like we are on the court... during those moments, it's like all that hard work's paid off. If you know what I mean."

Aomine did know what he meant. But that didn't mean he had to acknowledge this in any manner more expressive than a shallow nod. He was getting tired. Maybe he should go to bed soon.

He got up and grabbed another beer.

"So, what about you, Aomine?" Kagami raised his voice so Aomine could hear it in the kitchen. "What is it about Tetsuya that makes you so hot and bothered?"

_I don't need a reason to be hot and bothered. It's_ Tetsu _. I've wanted him since I was fucking twelve._ This was obviously not the answer he shared with Kagami, however. 

A shrug, casual but careful, as Aomine slipped back onto the couch. He had initially planned to just get the one beer, but a second can had somehow managed to slip into his other hand. He offered it to Kagami, who accepted. "Most people just see me as some kind of basketball machine. They look at me and just calculate what I can do for them, and what it’ll take to make me do it. I've always liked how Kuroko tried to figure out what else was in there too."

Kagami snorted. "Oh, come _on_. If any of us have a one-track mind when it comes to basketball, it's Kuroko. He was probably just trying to figure you out as a human to make his misdirection work better, that's all. You know how serious he is about team play."

Aomine didn't have the energy to do anything but shake his head. "That's not it. Don't ask me how I know. But what we had was more than basketball."

Kagami had finished his first beer and took a long draught out of the second. He looked at the can in Aomine's hand with an appraising eye. "How many have you had, anyway? Beers, that is?"

"At this point..." Aomine tried to think back. "This is number eight or something? Why?"

"How many can you normally drink before blacking out?" 

Aomine shrugged. "Dunno. Satsuki never lets me drink more than a handful." 

"Ha. I am so telling on you."

"Don't be a little bitch, Kagami."

Every time he said his rival's name, it sounded more natural on his tongue.

He took another sip, trying to burn that stupid girly thought away.

"So Aomine. Since you probably won’t remember this conversation anyway… ever thought about what it would be like to have sex with Tetsuya?"

And Aomine promptly choked on his beer. Literally choked. _Gross, did some of it even come out of my nose?_ "You fucking hypocrite! You can't keep getting on my case for thinking that he'd probably be a good fuck and then turn around and do the same thing yourself!"

"I guess that's true." Kagami paused for a moment. "But seriously. How do you think Tetsuya would be like in bed? Even when I’m trying to fantasize about him, I have trouble imagining."

"How am I supposed to know? Go ask Tetsu." Aomine tried to act unruffled by the question (or at least, as unruffled as was possible after spouting out beer like a fountain a few moments earlier).

Kagami laughed. "Wow, that would be an awful conversation. 'Oh hey, Kuroko. Nice weather we've having today. Makes me wonder about your, you know, sexual kinks and stuff.' " He shook his head. "As if that would work. But since it’s obvious this is on both of our minds, let’s wonder for a bit. How do you think he likes it, rough or gentle?"

"Definitely rough." Aomine hadn't intended to answer, but the response just popped out. “He likes… well, like when we used to make out, he liked pushing me up against walls and stuff.”

Kagami’s eyes widened. “ _He_ pushed _you_ against a wall?”

“I mean, I let him. It’s not like he actually overpowered me or anything. Even back then I was a lot bigger.”

Kagami sat in silence for a moment as he processed this. Then, his face contorted with a second realization. “You and Tetsuya _kissed_?” he yelled. “What the hell? When did this happen?”

“Shut up, the neighbors’ll hear.” Aomine closed his eyes. What he’d just said right then- that had been dumb. Kagami could have lived a perfectly long and happy life never knowing about Kuroko’s adolescent romantic affairs. But he couldn’t take it back now. “And obviously it was back at Teiko. We kinda dated for a while.”

“How long is a while?”

Aomine screwed up his face, trying to squeeze through the cracks of his drunken laziness just enough to count the seasons. “Almost a year, I think. We broke it off right after nationals our third year.”

The look on Kagami’s face was still incredulous, so Aomine continued. “What, you think I’d have been after him all these years if I thought I had no chance? Tetsu used to worship the ground I walked on, you know. He was practically hanging off my dick for-”

“You guys had sex?”

Aomine frowned, ready to chastise Kagami for interrupting him with stupid questions. That was before he saw the look in the redhead’s face, however. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a person look so miserable. 

Although under normal circumstances Aomine wouldn't have called himself a real warm-hearted guy, he still figured that he might as well nip this misconception in the bud. After all, Aomine didn't want Kagami to be upset about losing to him in the past, before they had even started playing the game- he wanted him to be upset about how catastrophically he was going to lose in the future. 

"Don't be in an idiot. I told you before, Kuroko wasn't ready back then." 

"But he was ready to _make out_ with you, and shove you against walls and have his phantomy way with you-"

"Kagami." Aomine flopped over and put a hand over the redhead's mouth. "Just... oh my god, just _shut up_. Your voice is so annoying sometimes. If I say that we didn't have sex, then we didn't have sex. Simple as that."

Kagami pushed his hand aside and continued to hyperventilate. His face was almost the color of his hair, at this point. It made Aomine chuckle. "Okay, maybe. But you did _something._ There can be a thin line between sex and, you know, not sex. Like, you could have touched hisdick, and it wouldn't have been sex. Shit, please don't tell me that you've touched Tetsuya's dick-"

Aomine smirked. "Tetsu's got a surprisingly nice one. Not as big as mine, but, you know. Still hot."

"What makes you think I wanted to know that?" Kagami screeched, covering his eyes with a forearm. "Shit, I am not drunk enough for this conversation. I'm getting another beer. Actually, I'm stealing the rest of the one you're drinking. Consider yourself cut off for the night."

"But it's mine," Aomine whined, as he struggled unsuccessfully to wrestle it back from Kagami. "You're disgusting, think about the germs."

"You're the one who's touched another guy’s dick!"

"Oh come on, it's not like I licked it or anything."

"You better not have." Kagami chugged the rest of the can down in one long gulp. 

Aomine pouted and contemplated revenge. "Well, since you already think I'm such a slut, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that I just sucked some guy off before I started to drink. Looks like you don’t mind the taste of come, though, since you went and put your mouth on my beer anyway-"

An empty can collided with the side of his head. He wasn't sure whether to wince or to laugh. 

"I am going to kill you, Aomine. I am going to kill you until you are good and dead. But first I need to find some mouthwash." Kagami had risen from the couch and had begun to stalk his way over to the bathroom.

Aomine grabbed at the back of his shirt, stopping him mid-stride. "That was a joke, idiot. Come on, who would I be giving a blowjob to anyway?"

Kagami didn't turn around to look at him. "How am I supposed to know? You know lots of people that I don't. Maybe there's some other gay guy on your team or whatever." He pulled out of Aomine's grip and altered his course, heading for the refrigerator rather than the bathroom. He came back with another beer and sat back down on the couch.

"Like I would fuck one of my teammates."

Kagami gave him an exasperated look, as if reminding him that not only did he have no qualms with taking a trip into a teammate's pants, but that in fact attempting to do so had been one of the driving motivations of his adolescence. Aomine just shrugged in response. "It's different when basketball's your career instead of just a club. Besides, I think they're all straight anyway. It’s _really_ different from high school."

"Hmm."

They were silent for a few minutes. Kagami kept throwing back beers like it was his job, while Aomine closed his eyes and just enjoyed his intoxicated stupor. He _liked_ being drunk. He liked the connected feeling he had to each individual moment, how his senses blurred together and made him aware of all the things he normally would tune out, like the traffic noises out his window and the feel of the rough corduroy upholstery against his skin and the sound of Kagami breathing a little bit hard, a little bit fast. 

For some reason, all he wanted to do right then was make his rival breathe even faster. 

"Hey. Kagami. You're a virgin, aren't you?"

Kagami looked over at him. "I never said that."

"But I'm right, aren't I? You keep on talking about how you've been so in _love_ with Tetsu all these years. I bet you're the type to think that it'd be cheating on him or something like that, if you had sex with someone else."

Kagami got a weird look on his face, and for a moment Aomine wasn't sure whether he was going to answer him or punch him. But the expression soon passed, giving way to a sigh and another swig of beer. 

"Yeah, so? It's not like Tetsuya would mind if I was. Between having sex with somebody that actually cares about you, even if you have to figure it out the technical stuff as you go, and doing it with somebody that you know has fucked half of Tokyo, which do you think he would like more?"

Aomine frowned. "I have not fucked half of Tokyo. I haven't even fucked a quarter of Tokyo."

As a matter of fact, he had only had sex with three people in his life, four if you counted that confusing night with Kuroko back in middle school. That wasn't because he felt some obligation to stay loyal to Kuroko or whatever. He'd just... never really been interested in anyone else. Girls in magazines, sure, but never real people. Even with the people that he _had_ fucked- a few random girls from around his neighborhood this year and, repeatedly in high school, Sakurai- it hadn't been because he'd really been into it. They had just been persistent, and turning them down had become a chore. 

"Maybe. But if you really don't know what you're doing at all, I think that would piss Tetsu off."

Kagami's forehead creased. "Come on. It's sex, not rocket science. If you mess around with someone's dick for long enough, they're going to come, even if you aren’t that good at it."

Aomine ran a hand through his hair. "That's...." He couldn't even properly come up with the words to describe how flawed Kagami’s logic sounded. “Shit, Kagami, I feel sorry for whatever guy you end up with. That sounds unsexy as fuck.”

“I know there’s more to it than that!” If Kagami’s face hadn’t been flushed before, it definitely was now. “But if you haven’t noticed, I _am_ pretty hot stuff. Once Tetsuya and I get together, I don’t think it’ll be too hard to figure out how to be sexy.”

Aomine raised an eyebrow. “And you say that I’m the cocky one. Being as sexy as I am doesn’t just happen overnight, you know. You're going to have to practice a lot."

"Maybe _you_ had to practice a lot, to compensate for being a grumpy-looking ganguro with a bad haircut-"

"Oi!"

"-but I think I'll do just fine. Tetsuya already thinks I'm hot, you know that? He said once he wished he had a body like mine."

"That's just because he wishes he could dunk, dumbass!,” Aomine said, gritting his teeth. “He used to say stuff like that to me too."

Kagami just crossed his arms in response, not backing down an inch. Aomine groaned in frustration and slumped bonelessly onto the couch. The beer was still churning inside of him, Kagami was still breathing really loudly, and the stupidest fucking idea had just popped into his head. 

"Okay then. Okay. If you think being sexy's so easy, then why not make that our next challenge? Call it the... who is a mightier sex god challenge, or something."

Kagami sounded deep in thought when he responded. "Could be interesting. How do we measure who's sexier though, without getting Tetsuya involved?"

Aomine raised his head off the back of the couch, just high enough to cast a withering look at his rival. "How do you _think_ we would measure it, Bakagami?"

At first, this remark just seemed to confuse the other boy. But then the color drained suddenly from his face, and Aomine knew that his meaning had hit home.

"You are such a pervert! Are you saying that... the two of us... Ugh, you are so _repulsive_!"

Aomine shifted closer to Kagami, sniggering when he heard the redhead's breath hitch. "Isn't this a great opportunity for you, though? Think about it. You could prove you're as hot as you think you are, make me look like an idiot, and get in a practice round before the real thing, all at the same time. Three for the price of one."

"Stop _advertising_ it like some slimy salesperson. This is not a fancy Hawaiian vacation. This is you trying to put your dick in my ass."

Aomine burst into laughter, almost too caught up in that to notice the spike of heat that had shot through his groin at those words. "Kagami, my dick is so much better than a Hawaiian vacation. You don't even know," he purred, leaning in close to his rival's ear. "And I'm not saying that I have to put in in. Hell, I don't even _want_ to put it in. Weren’t you the one that said that that there’s... how did you put it? 'A fine line between sex and not-sex'?"

Aomine reached out and grabbed Kagami's toned thigh, kneading it slow and hard between his fingers. For a moment Kagami watched the hand as it worked, eyes wide. Then he looked away. 

That wouldn't do. Aomine dug in with his fingertips and gave him an abrupt squeeze, jerking Kagami's attention back towards him. "Whoever makes the other person come first wins," he clarified. "You're already lagging behind, Kagami. I'm not even hard yet, but you..."

He looked down at his hand again and trailed it upward a few centimeters. Dressed in basketball shorts as Kagami was, there was no way to hide the mound that had had started to form down there. 

Kagami swatted his hand away. When he spoke again, his voice was shaky. “Don’t touch me. If it’s not Kuroko, then why would I want it?”

“Could’ve fooled me.” Aomine wondered whether there was any significance to the way that he had shifted back to calling Kuroko by his surname, the same way that he always did in public. Did he feel guilty or something, like he was being watched? Even if he lived a million years, Aomine would never understand lovesick idiots. “Besides, if you _do_ win the challenge… it’s not cheating if you don’t get off.”

All of the sudden, there was a hand fisting his shirt. There was a face in front of his face, close enough that he could feel its breath. And Aomine knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had finally worn Kagami down. The challenge was on. 

In his drunken state, the idea was almost as exciting as it was terrifying.

“You can be _such_ an _asshole_ sometimes _,_ ” the redhead snarled, slamming him against the couch on his back. “Kuroko deserves so much better than you.”

Aomine tried to shift, to reclaim even a tiny bit personal space from which to wage further attacks, but to his amazement he found that he couldn’t move. Kagami was using all of his body weight to pin him down, and Aomine couldn’t muster up the strength right then to stop him.

“Shit,” he mumbled, as Kagami started pushing even closer. When the redhead shifted to straddle his lap, he couldn’t help but suck in a hissing breath. “ _Shit._ ” He made the mistake of looking up at Kagami’s face.

And starting right then, every single thing in Aomine world was made up of heat and sweat and red, red eyes. 

“Huh, I guess you really do like it rough,” Kagami observed, sliding his arms upward from Aomine’s shirtfront, pinning his wrists on either side of his head. The motion made Aomine’s t-shirt ride up a little, just a few scant centimeters, but enough to make him shudder. Kagami’s grip was hard and nearly painful, but the cotton felt so soft as it brushed against his skin. 

“You think this is rough?” he choked out. “Don’t make me laugh. This is what happens when virgins think they can handle kinky things.”

Kagami responded with an equanimous shrug and a quick dip of his hips, and Aomine had to bite back a grunt as he felt the other boy’s erection brush against his own. _Damn it. Since when has that been there?_  

He tried to figure out a way to fight back, to turn the tables on his opponent so that the competition could proceed in his favor. But when he consulted his alcohol-soaked mind as to how this might be accomplished, the only advice it gave him was to thrust back up against Kagami, and seek out that heat once again. So Aomine did that. 

He quickly realized how poor of an idea that had been when Kagami had _groaned_ , a low little noise that shot through Aomine's entire body before coming to rest in his groin. If Aomine hadn't been fully hard before, he certainly was now.

"This is so weird," Kagami murmured above him. "What are we doing?"

"Shut up. You know you like it," Aomine replied without thinking. He thrust his hips upward again.

Kagami shut up.

The two of them continued to grind, meeting each other in short, quick bursts of pressure. Aomine tried to control the rhythm from beneath Kagami as best as he could, but it was hard without having either of his hands at his disposal- every now and again he gave his wrists a quick wriggle, seeing if he couldn't pull them out of Kagami's grasp, but he knew as well as anyone how unrelenting the other boy could be. 

In a way, his helplessness galled him. He wasn't _used_ to being on the bottom- Sakurai and his masochistic streak had made sure of that. And even though Kuroko's kinks had always tended toward the other extreme, there had never really been any threat behind him. Aomine had always been confident in his superior size and strength. But being in this situation now, with Kagami's full size and weight pressing down on top of him, his dick sliding firmly and inescapably against his own, an intense expression transforming his face from that of his goofy-looking rival to that of somebody he didn't even know...

Aomine could feel his blood pumping in every part of his body, and, with a sort of horror, he realized that he was going to come. To have any chance of winning this competition, he had toget out from under Kagami and establish his own pace. So he channeled all the strength that his intoxicated body was able to spare into one final _push_ to the side. 

That did the trick. He breathed a prayer of thanks as Kagami toppled off the couch, a look of surprise cutting through the arousal on his face as he narrowly missed striking his head against the coffee table. "What the- Aomine!"

It was the work of a moment to slide down on top of him, neatly reversing the position that the two of them had just been in. When Kagami continued to protest, Aomine silenced him with a bite to the ear, quick but hard. Kagami sputtered and Aomine smirked. 

"Thought you'd like that." He kept his body low against Kagami’s for a tense second, ready to react if the redhead made any move to turn the tables again. After deciding that no counterattack was forthcoming, his hands slid underneath Kagami’s shirt and began to trace a slow, lingering path down his torso. When his fingers reached the elastic strap of his waistband, Aomine thought he heard a tiny moan. “Keep being good, and I’ll give you something else that you’ll like…”

“You sound like a creepy old man. It’s kind of a boner-kill.”

Aomine considered all of the sarcastic responses he could make, like how Kagami’s face was also a boner-kill and so he had to make the competition fair somehow, but in the end he decided to keep quiet. To keep quiet, and to quietly plunge his hand into Kagami’s shorts and wrap his fingers around his dick. 

“Shit!” Kagami threw his head back against the floor. Aomine took advantage of this action by sinking his teeth into his exposed neck, biting stepping-stones from his ear down to his collarbone as he jerked him off roughly. “And- god damn it, stop biting me! Are you a dog or something?”

Aomine pulled his head back for a moment, just enough that Kagami could see the look of amusement on his face. “You would let a dog do this to you? I thought you were afraid of- hnng!” He winced as Kagami ground a palm against his dick. Even through his pants, that shit was _sensitive_. Aomine growled and drew back a bit, though he kept his hand clamped around Kagami’s leaking member. “Well, what am I supposed to do, then?”

“Like, normal stuff! Whatever you used to do with Kuroko!”

Aomine frowned and pulled his hand away, eyes dark and contemplative. Kagami moaned and instinctively bucked his hips upward, too far gone in his lust, Aomine supposed, to realize what he had just asked for. His face was pink with exertion, eyes lidded, mouth open as he let out a series of soft moans. He looked good that way, Aomine thought. Not like Kuroko, not enough to make him forget that none of what they were doing just then fell under the category of “normal stuff”. But still. He looked good.

Taking in a deep, rattling breath, Aomine moved in again, lining his body up on top of Kagami’s, reaching again for his cock. He brought their lips together. 

Kagami came. And as Aomine looked down at the semen dripping down his hand, warm at first but congealing rapidly, he wondered for the hundredth and the first time exactly what kind of game they were playing.

 


	8. The Basketball Which Momoi Plays

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The basketball which Momoi plays", otherwise known as "the chapter with that random and probably unnecessary OC which the author refuses to apologize for."
> 
> Enjoy, I guess?

It was nine o' clock on a Saturday morning, and Momoi had already accomplished more than many people would in an entire day. As usual, she had awoken just before dawn, had washed her face and gotten dressed in a cute new sundress before there was even a sun in the sky to justify it. She had prepared some tea and skimmed her preferred news websites, lingering over a fatalistic and biased op-ed article on the global economy. She had evaluated the state of her refrigerator and made a list of everything she would need to buy at the grocery store later that day. And she was just beginning to get out her mop and bucket to begin her weekly clean of the apartment when the doorbell rang. A quick glance through the peephole revealed the visitor to be Aomine.

And just one look at the expression on his face told her that the productive phase of her day was at an end.

When Momoi opened the door, Aomine didn't even bother to take off his shoes before making a beeline for the couch. He slumped down onto it, covered his eyes with a forearm, and started to complain. "Satsuki, I'm hungry. Make me some eggs."

This complete lack of manners and regard towards other humans was just so typically Aomine that Momoi wondered whether her initial impression could have been off base. He certainly didn’t seem to be acting differently, at least in any way she could describe and quantify. Nonetheless, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was subtly _off_ about him. The way his face looked right then reminded her of times in the past when he'd done something stupid- like gotten a basketball stuck on a rooftop or broken the keychain that Kuroko had gotten her- and tried to keep it a secret.

Momoi sighed and cut straight to the point. 

"What did you do, Dai-chan?" 

He peeked out from under his arm, trying to hide the nervous look in his eyes, failing. "I drank too much last night and now I've got a massive hangover. And so I need to eat eggs."

She crossed her arms and waited. That wasn't it, it wasn't quite dumb enough to explain the dulled edges around his normal cocky attitude. But they were getting closer. "Yeah, that's what always happens when you drink too much. You brought this upon yourself, you know."

"I know it," Aomine grumbled. He retreated behind his arm again, hiding his eyes from the light. 

He didn't seem inclined to pick up the conversation again, so Momoi did it for him. "Where were you? Did you go out?"

Aomine shook his head, slowly, laboriously. "Nah, I was just at home. Kagami came over."

"Kagamin?" Momoi frowned. That was an unfortunate development. Now that she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt what the Springtime Cup was, she didn't like to think about it anymore. As if maybe her forgetting about it would cause it to simply disappear. "Not Tetsu-kun?"

Aomine shook his head. "That would've sucked. Tetsu can't hold his liquor. Remember Kise's graduation party?"

Very few people remembered Kise's graduation party as anything other than a haze of alcohol and flashing lights and too-loud music, Momoi included. However, she had sobered up enough at the night progressed to remember the Generation of Miracles' "after party" at the basketball court, and Kuroko trying to ignite-pass under the influence of a few spiked milkshakes.

"You were just as far gone as he was." 

Aomine shrugged. "There are people who would kill to play ball as well sober as I do drunk. And are you making breakfast yet?"

"Not until you stop changing the subject. What did you _do_?"

"I told you. We got drunk."

"Daiki." She crossed her arms. "You wouldn't have come here if you didn't want to tell me. What kind of person with a hangover gets on a train and goes all the way across town, unless they're in the middle of a crisis?"

Aomine tried to hold her gaze for a moment, and then deflated, realizing that, as usual, there was no way he could win this. "Maybe you're right," he conceded, voice little more than a murmur. 

"Of course I'm right. So get talking."

He didn't get talking, though. At least right away. His first order of business seemed to be slipping further down on the couch, forming some kind of boneless, curled-up puddle on the cushion. "Remember second year at Touou, when me and Sakurai were fucking all the time, and the sex was awesome but other than that he was still the lamest person I've ever met?"

"Yes. That was exploitative and gross and I'm glad you finally listened to me and ended it."

Aomine tensed at this. "Hey, I keep telling you- he was the one exploiting me!"

"You poor defenseless thing." Momoi rolled her eyes. "Get to the point." 

"I'm trying! Just... give me a second. This isn't easy, you know." 

Momoi gave him a second, and then another second. Almost a whole minute passed before Aomine finally spoke again.

"Actually, nothing happened. This is stupid. I’m going home now." 

He stood up with surprising speed considering how limp and defeated he had seemed to be a moment before. However, he wasn't so fast that Momoi couldn't easily intercept him.

She shoved him back on the couch. He didn't try to get up again. But he continued to give her the silent treatment. 

Momoi racked her brain, thinking of a way to goad Aomine into speech. It wasn't easy. On a normal day, the more pressing problem would be trying to get him to shut up. "Did you finally man up and ask Tetsu-kun out?" she wondered. Since Aomine seemed to have sex on the brain, she thought that the suggestion hadn't been too off-base. However, her friend's scandalized protests soon proved her wrong.

"I start out by talking about people who are lame and suck and you think that I'm trying to say something about _Tetsu_? What the hell, Satsuki, I thought the two of you were friends!"

"Who are you talking about then? Kagami-kun?"

Aomine drew back a little, and Momoi know that she was on the right track. Ordinarily she would have already been halfway through beating a lesson into Aomine into how normal, well-adjusted people treated those who thought of them as friends, just on the basic assumption that any drama that might have happened with Kagami had been one hundred percent Aomine's fault. But this time her throat seemed all dry and tight for some reason, and she couldn’t choke out a single word. 

Aomine opened his mouth, and almost before Momoi could make out what he was saying, she was flooded by certainly that, once again, everything had changed without her permission.

"Kagami and I had sex. Last night."

The words spun around in Momoi's head a little bit before they grew too heavy for her to support. With a soft creak, she felt her body thud down onto the couch next to Aomine. 

"We were really drunk though, so... I dunno. Maybe it was just a thing. Like, an alcohol thing."

Momoi tried to get herself to believe this for a moment. Aomine had been spending more time with Kuroko than normal, she reasoned, and he had been participating in this stupid Springtime Cup. Maybe all that unrequited lust had worn him down, made him a little desperate. Maybe he would have had sex with anyone at all after a few beers. She had never known Aomine to have drunken hookups with people he wasn’t supposed to hook up with before, but in circumstances like these...

_If it was just an "alcohol thing", though, why would Dai-chan still look so afraid?_

Because, yes, that was what it was, that emotion that had been plastered across Aomine's face and body and words since the moment he'd stepped into her apartment that morning. It had been stupid of her not to recognize it before. She'd grown accustomed to an angry Aomine, and a bored Aomine, even a playful Aomine, but she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen a _scared_ Aomine. His actions from the previous night were going to have consequences, and he knew it. He knew.

...

There was no good explanation as to why it should feel like the world was crashing down on her right then. If Aomine and Kagami’s friendship was ruined, or if they became lovers, it had nothing to do with Momoi. Her relationships with the two of them were mostly separate anyway- no matter what happened, she would still drop by Kagami's house before important games to share data on his team's next opponents, and Aomine would still crash at her place from time to time and demand extravagant breakfasts in the mornings. There would be a little drama, but she could shield herself from it. The relationships that she built her life upon wouldn't need to break this time. It wouldn't have to be like Teiko all over again.

A cab drove by her window, and Momoi calculated its velocity. 

"Aren't you going to yell at me now?"

"Daiki is a despicable human being. The absolute worst," she said, voice mechanical. Another car came by, this time at a speed of 51.5 kilometers per hour. At this rate it would pass the first one in twelve seconds. 

Aomine groaned. "Satsuki. Be serious. I really fucked up here. What should I do?"

Although holding a conversation was the last thing on Momoi's mind right then, she understood that social conventions dictated an answer. "I really don't know, Dai-chan. I wasn't there. I don't know why you did it, or how you left things with Kagami-kun."

“Kagami was still passed out in my apartment when I left. He’s been asleep since right after he… you know. Right after.” Aomine brought his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them. “And why it happened- I don't know either. It’s fucking weird. Like, I remember _what_ happened really clearly. But I don’t remember _why_. I’ve been… you know.” He let out a breath. “It’s probably Tetsu’s fault. Has he told you about this new basketball technique he’s been working on?”

“He has not.” 

“Shit then, you’ve gotta listen to this. It’ll give you nightmares.”

Momoi half-listened as Aomine explained Kuroko’s new technique to her and how it had rendered him unable to think of anything other than Kagami for the past few weeks.

“What do you think of that? Isn’t that messed up?” Aomine looked expectant, as if he were waiting for any kind of confirmation that what had happened the previous night hadn’t been his fault. 

Normally Momoi would have had no qualms with crushing this little theory of his into the ground, with letting him know in no uncertain terms that that was not _at all_ how Kuroko’s misdirection worked and that in all probability Aomine was just in love with Kagami or something. But three cars were approaching her window at once right then, and she didn’t have time to explain things to idiots.

“Very messed up,” she agreed. 

“Yeah. Yeah it is.” Aomine nodded vigorously and then winced, as if remembering too late that he had a blazing headache. “Kagami didn’t believe me, though, when I gave him a hint last week that Tetsu’s new technique was evil. He keeps saying that it’s cool and not that big a deal, that they’ve already started practicing it with the team, even though he himself admits that Tetsu’s had this weird thing about trying to trick the two of us into being friends or whatever for years…”

“ _I want him to be happy, at least. And to feel loved even when he’s hurting.”_

For a while now, Momoi hadn’t really heard any of the words that Aomine had been saying. Or rather, she had heard them, responded, and then forgot them the second they ceased to have a practical use. However, something about the last part in Aomine’s rant just then had registered with her. Because Kuroko had told her a similar thing that night so long ago, that night when the two of them hadgotten lost on purpose and found themselves at Touou. 

_“After the events of the past few weeks, as well as certain of my own efforts, I am more confident than ever that I’m not wrong.”_

“Tetsu-kun, you idiot,” Momoi muttered. Was this what he had wanted to happen? Could it be that, while Aomine and Kagami had been competing for his body in the Springtime Cup, Kuroko had been playing a game of his own? She should have known that the Cup had been too stupid an idea for any rational person to come up with. If Kuroko had been the one to plant the initial idea in one of their minds, though… well, that would explain a lot of things.

And also ruin a lot of things.

...

Up until this point, Momoi had chosen to live in a controllable and predictable world. The kind of world where research leads to results, where a player who can vertical jump 79 centimeters will lose in a tip-off to a taller one who can jump a full meter, where the act of smiling at a stranger will, 83 times out of 100, cause them to smile back. 

Her friends had, likewise, been predictable. Sure, the original Teiko team had suffered through an adjustment period that had temporarily brought out the worst in them, but at the end of the day her old teammates hadn’t really changed. Kise could still neither copy Kuroko's misdirection nor contain his enthusiasmfor his friends. Midorima would still make every untouched three-pointer and grumble when she teased him. And Aomine would still hide his basketball injuries and simmer silently in his love for Kuroko. This was the balance that they had set in the beginning, when Momoi had had even more trouble dealing with change than she had now, and those familiar rhythms had supported her and gave her life shape since then. Their external appearances had changed, but their internal logic had not. 

It had been more of a model than a world, really, Momoi thought. A moving diorama that she had mistaken for reality. And all the while Kuroko had been on the outside, failing to be controlled by its laws.

No matter how many times she told herself that it she was overreacting, Momoi still found it a lot to handle. If she had been alone right then, she knew that she would have dealt with the stress by just sitting on her couch for an indefinite length of time, wasting the day or days to come with staring out the window and letting her mind lose itself in the familiar gridlock of calculations and probabilities. She’d done it before.

“...and now I’m here, and you’re right, getting on the train this morning was like a hundred basketballs being thrown at my head, and I haven’t taken a shower yet even though I probably need at least six or seven to get that guy’s… to get that guy _off_ me, and I still haven’t eaten any eggs…”

“Okay, okay. I’ll make you eggs.” Her voice still sounded a little robotic to her ears, but it was getting better. “What kind do you want?”

“Scrambled with onions,” Aomine said immediately.

“I can do that.”

Perhaps it was fortunate, then, that Momoi almost never found herself alone. There was something to be said for having a childhood friend who’s always there for you, she thought, as she rose from the couch and made her way to the kitchen. Even if said friend is thoughtless, and demanding, and truly a basketball idiot.

 

By the time she had stuffed Aomine full of eggs, given him some aspirin for his headache, and forced him to go to her room and nap, Momoi was feeling a little bit better about things. Not so much better that she felt able to get back to housecleaning, but enough that she could function at a minimal level. Enough that she began to consider paying Kuroko a visit.

There were a lot of reasons why confronting him would be a terrible idea. She was neither calm nor collected right then. Talking with him would be useless at best, and throw her into another panicked tailspin that even the now-gently-snoring Aomine would be powerless to muscle her out of at worst. That would be pretty bad.

But nonetheless, half an hour later Momoi found herself sitting on Kuroko’s couch, stroking Nigou’s back as her blue-haired friend brought her a glass of water.

She had to know if she was right. 

Kuroko listened patiently as she told him her concerns, all of them, even the irrational ones. She told him that he was treating his friends like toys. That he had exploited Aomine’s stupidity to force feelings and impulses that never would have developed on their own. That he had used the mystique of his misdirection for evil rather than for basketball glory. No matter how serious the accusation, Kuroko never cut in to defend himself. Even when Momoi mustered up the courage to suggest that Kuroko had known what the Springtime Cup had been all along and had been lying to her, he denied nothing. 

She finished saying her piece, and the two of them sat in silence for a moment. Momoi sipped her water. Kuroko brought Nigou into his lap and messed around with his ears. The world kept spinning around them, maybe a little bit slower than before. 

Eventually, Momoi couldn’t take the silence anymore, and she opened her mouth to speak again. But Kuroko cut in. 

"What would you have done in my situation, Momoi?” In anyone else’s mouth that would have sounded sarcastic, but Kuroko delivered it like a question he genuinely wanted to know the answer to. “If you knew that your two best friends were both thinking of you in a way that you did not reciprocate, and that rejecting either of them might ruin your relationship for good? Yes, you’re quite right. I planted the idea in Kagami’s mind that the two of them should compete over me- in more of a basketball context than a romantic one, but it seems my meaning came through. Knowing them, it was obvious that this competition would escalate and change course. And yes, I knew that Aomine had certain misconceptions about my new technique, which I never confirmed but also never denied. I’m sorry if you don’t agree with my methods. But I thought- and still think- it was all worth it. At least if they get together, there’s a chance all of us can stay friends...”

Momoi didn't have an answer for him other than the lingering sense of betrayal in her chest, and she realized that she had been right. It had been a bad idea to come here. So she left.

 

It was nearly June now, and getting hot. Momoi could almost feel the blacktop simmering through the soles of her tennis shoes. Even the leather of the basketball burned her. For a moment she considered giving up and coming back later, after the midday heat had broken, but she brushed that idea aside. Leaving the court now would mean going back to face an awake and alert Aomine, rather than the sleeping one that she had encountered when she'd ducked back into her apartment to change clothes. Such a possibility was not at all appealing.

She gave the ball a few experimental dribbles to assess its weight and movement. It didn't bounce as high as a regulation ball would, but that was unavoidable. It had been a long time since she had gone off on her own to play, after all. Her ball probably hadn't seen a pump since the previous fall. But it would have to do. 

_"Let's see if I remember any of this,"_ she thought to herself, spinning the ball up into a firm grasp. She fixed her eyes on the hoop, channeled her inner Midorima, and let fly. 

It hit the rim and rebounded at a skewed angle, forcing Momoi to sprint across the court to retrieve it before it bounced its way into the streetball game that was in full swing at one of the other hoops. 

_"Guess not,"_ she thought, grimacing.

Her second shot had similar results, as well as her third. After a while, however, the ball began to feel familiar in her hands once again, and she started to settle into her normal, slightly more successful rhythm. She would never be a high-percentage shooter, that much was clear. But then again, neither would pretty much anybody whose basketball skills hadn't been molded in the furnace of the Generation of Miracles, so she decided not to lose too much sleep over her poor shot record. In any case, she still had her data, and with that she could win basketball games without ever setting foot on a court. 

Three shots became four, four became sixteen, and before she knew it, Momoi was too focused on the present shot to keep track of how many she had attempted previously. For a statistician this would have been an embarrassment, but for a college girl just trying to get her mind off of things, it was liberating, and she wondered whether her current state might be like a baby version of the Zone.

A particularly spectacular air-ball jerked her out of her reverie. As Momoi trotted over to reclaim the ball, she laughed at that pretension. Then she made her way back to the free-throw line, preparing herself to try again. 

That was when she noticed that she was no longer alone in front of her hoop.

The streetball game over on the other side of the court had come to an end a few minutes ago- Momoi had been dimly aware of a lot of commotion and arguing which, in her experience, always followed the end of a particularly close game. She had thought that all of the boys had left after that. But one of them had escaped her notice. 

“You’re not extending your arms enough when you shoot. If you don’t follow through, the ball won’t have enough power to make it to the hoop.”

Now that she could see the intruder from a closer distance, she recognized him instantly. He was a freshman on her college’s basketball team, by the name of Shimada… Hiro? Hide? Something to that effect. He wasn't their starting point guard, but if his development continued according to Momoi's predicted trajectory, he would likely step into that role next year when the current one graduated. He was dedicated, hardworking, and had the highest success rate for outside shots of anybody on the team.

...her school had played a practice match against Kuroko and Kagami's a few weeks back. What kind of phantom-manager worth her salt would _not_ know these things?

Of course, she had learned not to give any hints of her insider knowledge to those involved. It tended to creep them out. So instead of greeting him by name as she might have done, Momoi opted to tilt her head cutely and smile. "You go to my school, don't you?" She named it and he nodded, a smile breaking across his face.

"Hah, what are the chances?" He extended a hand. "Shimada Hiroto. I'm a freshman this year in the agriculture school. I don't think I've seen you around, though. What's your name?"

"Momoi Satsuki. I've also just started, in the economics department." 

Shimada let out a laugh. "Woah, must have a real brain on you! Wish I could say the same; my mom keeps telling me that I've taken too many basketballs to the head to make anything of myself."

"Aw, I wouldn't believe that." Momoi said. It would have been stupid to pass up a chance of accumulating more data, and so she found a way to switch the conversation to her main interest. "So you're a basketball player, huh?"

Shimada flashed her a broad smile, one so genuine and excited that Momoi couldn't help but return it. "Yup, pretty much since I could walk! I'm actually on our university team, I play point guard."

"Ooh, so I'm getting shooting advice from a real pro!" Momoi giggled. "Lucky me."

"I mean, assuming that you want advice. Sorry to just barge in; I've just been watching you for a little while now, and you seem pretty... pretty good, you know? Like you’ve got potential." Shimada rubbed the back of his neck, his smile from before slipping into a grimace. "I can just leave you be if you wanted to hang out alone."

"No, no, I appreciate the company." Momoi bounced him the ball. "Why don't you show me your form?"

He dribbled the ball a few times, frowning as Momoi had at how flat it was. Then without any warning, the ball was in the air. It rattled off the hoop, for a moment in danger of tipping over the wrong side, before dropping through the net. 

Shimada was still frowning. She supposed he was used to his shots being “nothing but net”. 

"Nice shot," Momoi said.

"Thanks. Here, you do the next one. I’m going to run over and get my own ball, this one’s kinda off." Momoi saw that Shimada was about to pass to her, and she raised her arms more out of defense than a desire to accept the ball. She had seen him pass during games before, and so she knew that the force he exerted at those times could probably have knocked her clear onto the next court. However, the pass he ended up sending her way was gentle. For a moment, Momoi felt the same kind of dissonance she felt whenever she’d accepted a pass from Kuroko. Knowing what he was capable of, and feeling him rein it in. 

She didn't want to think about that, though. So she looked over at the hoop, switched her mind to geometry mode, and tossed up the ball. 

Nothing but net. 

She looked over at Shimada, almost hoping that he hadn't seen it. It didn't do to outshoot one of the rising stars of her school's basketball team before she had even taken the guy's measure. 

But of course, Shimada _had_ seen it, and to his credit he didn't seem too put out by her success.

"Great job!" he said. "That's the way to make a free throw! Ha, maybe _you_ should be giving the advice to _me_." 

Momoi almost whipped her face with her ponytail with how emphatically she shook her head. "I was just doing what you told me to. You know, following through.”

Shimada smiled. "You certainly were! See if you can do it again. Or hey, maybe you want to play ‘horse’ or something. No threes or anything, I promise. I mean, unless you want to..." 

Momoi agreed. It had been a long time since she had played that with a normal person. Or at least, somebody outside of the Generation of Miracles. She'd almost forgot how fun it could be when it was actually a fair game. 

Because, to her surprise, it _was_ a fair game. Not in a statistical sense, of course. She knew that Shimada's success rate for inside shots was about 15% higher than hers, and so by the laws of probability it was unlikely that she could hold her own in a game against him. But hold her own she did, somehow, matching Shimada shot for shot. 

At first she thought that he was letting her win. A lot of guys did that. However, as the game wore on, Momoi became less and less convinced by this hypothesis. Normally guys let her win as some kind of misguided attempt to hit on her. However, the vibe that Momoi was getting from Shimada was less of a "player" thing and more of a "person who feels awkward in front of girls" thing. That in itself was an interesting data point, and she made a mental note to put that down in his file. She could use this information against him during their next game against her school. Maybe they could plant some cute girls in the front rows to distract him and neutralize his deadly outside shots. Apparently Kagami had a tribe of fangirls now, they could use that to their advantage...

As she watched Shimada sink a fancy-looking hook shot, though, and laugh the same kind of childlike, unguarded laugh that had typified Aomine back in the day, a new idea snuck into her brain. 

_Or, I could use this information as part of a training program for my university’s team. I could suggest inviting girls to watch practice, to make sure that Shimada and everyone else gets used to playing under unusual pressures._

She dribbled the ball slowly, pensively, not certain whether she should abandon this line of thinking or develop it further. It wasn’t as if she hated her school team. They were seeded high, probably in the top fifteen of all of the college basketball teams in the country. Just… nobody from the Generation of Miracles was on it, so it had never really seemed to matter before. It was no secret that Momoi preferred to stick with what she knew. 

But if everything was going to change anyway, how much more could one little adjustment hurt? Would it really be the end of the world if she started offering her services to another team? It might help her make new friends at her school, after all, and it wasn’t as if switching from one group of basketball idiots to another was that big of a leap. Certainly it would hurt less, considering.

She pondered these questions as she tried to emulate Shimada’s hook shot from before, aimed a little to far to the right, and threw up her arms with a squeak as the ball rebounded right back at her face. 

Shimada punched it out of the air before it made contact. 

“That’s an ‘S’!” he said with a laugh as Momoi peeked out at him between her fingers. “Better watch out- next shot could win it all!”

The next shot would _probably_ win it all, Momoi thought. Shimada was at S too, and although he’d been holding his own at that point for the past five or so rounds, it was definitely still anyone’s game, and Shimada knew it.

So he did what any good strategist would do and, while still respecting the sanctity of the “no three-pointer” rule, began more and more to disregard the spirit of it. The next time he chose the shot, it was a few scant centimeters inside the 3-point line, and at an angle where the sun was sure to get it the shooter’s eyes. _He must have played a lot of streetball, to think of that_ , Momoi thought, and once again was reminded of a toned-down, cleaner version of Aomine. 

Shimada made that shot and Momoi didn’t. He had won the game. But still she couldn’t find it in her to be mad at him.

“That was fun!” Shimada said.

Momoi hummed her assent. “Water break?”

“Yeah.”

They lingered a while over their water bottles, chatting about this and that. Their attempts to find common ground in school-related topics failed immediately- they were in very different courses of study, and none of their social circles overlapped. But there was always basketball to fall back on. 

And fall back they did. Although both of them acknowledged that there was no way the upcoming season could be as exciting as their penultimate high school one, when all of the original members of the Generation of Miracles had been active, there were still bound to be a few good games ahead of them. As she always did around outsiders, Momoi pretended that she didn’t know much about the college ball scene. And in this case the omission actually worked to her benefit. It was nice to hear about things from another person’s perspective sometimes.

Like his explanation of the Generation of Miracles, for example. 

“Apparently they were on the same team back in middle school, and, I don’t know, there must have been something in the water there, and suddenly they became really good. Like, beating-other-teams-by-100-plus-points good. So luckily, they split up and each went to a different high school, and played in a bunch of seriously sick grudge matches for, like, years.”

Momoi giggled. ‘Grudge matches’. She had never thought of those games in that way before. They had always seemed a lot more serious at the time- not only had their friendships been on the line, but also their ideologies, world views, future plans… Things had been pretty intense back then. But how could other people have known? “It sounds like something out of a manga.”

Shimada nodded vigorously. He nodded a lot, Momoi noted. Kind of like a cute, smiling bobblehead. “Exactly! A manga, or some kind of afternoon drama, even! I remember there used to be a lot of speculation about what happened to make them split up like that. Most of them have ended up being, you know, not entirely straight, so people think that maybe some of them used to date and had bad breakups and that’s why there’s so much bad blood. I don’t know though. It’s not like all of them could have been gay, right?”

“Yeah, that would be pretty unlikely,” Momoi agreed, while wishing that a certain pair of them could be a little _less_ gay every once in a while. She instantly regretted that thought, but oh well. “But it shouldn’t matter if they’re gay or not. Even if they were just friends, friendships can be pretty serious things.”

“You’ve got that right,” Shimada said. After another moment of reflection, he held up his arms. “And wait, wait, it’s not like I’ve got anything _against_ gay people! Heck, I’ve been dating the same guy for like three years now, it’s kind of been the hip thing to do in, you know, in the basketball circles, ever since all of those Generation of Miracles guys started coming out.” He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “People just talk, you know. It’s not malicious.”

Ah. So that’s why she hadn’t been picking up any flirtatious vibes from him. She really should just start assuming that every guy she met was into men; nine times out of ten, it ended up being true.

“I know, I know. Sorry, I wasn’t accusing you of anything. Thanks for keeping me up on all the gossip.”

Shimada looked relieved. “Well, there’s more where that came from!” he said. “I had a really good time today. It’s kind of rare for me to play basketball with someone who, you know,” he laughed, “actually _likes_ basketball. We should do this again sometime.” 

Momoi might not have gone so far as to say that she liked basketball. She used to, she remembered that much. Back in elementary school, when she’d been about a foot taller than Aomine and could win against him more often than not (although he would deny that to the day he died). Back before it had gotten so big and scary, and so many people that she cared about had been hurt by it. 

She wanted those days back. Wistfully, she looked at Shimada, wondered whether there was any way he could help her find them again. Sure, he wasn’t Aomine, wasn’t Kuroko. But she got the sense that he was somebody she could learn to care about. Maybe all of the recent fallout between Kuroko and the others had been a sign. She hadn’t been lying before when she said that friendships were important. But once she began to feel trapped by her relationships rather than supported by them, didn’t that mean that it was time to move on?

_What would you have done in my situation, Momoi?_

At the time, Momoi hadn’t been calm enough to process anything but the bare meaning of the words. But remembering back, it was hard to miss the tint of desperation there. Maybe Momoi wasn’t the only one feeling trapped. 

She accepted Shimada’s number. The weight of those few digits, though intangible, nonethless added about three kilograms to her phone. Not an unbearable burden, but an unmistakeable one. She didn’t know whether she would ever end up calling him, but at the moment it seemed best to keep her options open. 

 


	9. Back in the Game

Eventually, Aomine’s hangover subsided. His memories of that night faded. Days passed, and then weeks. But still the central question remained: what the _hell_ could have _possibly possessed_ him to have sex with Kagami?

No matter how much Aomine agonized over this question, mind on overdrive as it tried to analyze, rationalize, heck, even _comprehend_ what had happened, he couldn't figure it out. The obvious explanations were obviously all wrong. The alcohol, for instance. Momoi thought that was the main contributor to his loss of judgement at that time, and had accordingly read him a number of lectures on all of the fucked up things that could happen to a person while they were drunk, ranging from personal embarrassment to liver disease to vehicular manslaughter, and that was _before_ she got to her sublecture on the unique dangers of drunken hookups.

But despite what Momoi believed, Aomine wasn't the kind of person to get drunk and have sex with whatever warm body was nearby. He’d had the option of doing so countless times in his life- right after his recent injury, for example, when his frustration and boredom had pushed him into hitting the bars pretty hard, or at any of the high school parties he had started going to after his "aloof loner" phase at Touou- but had decided that it wasn't his style. And although he wasn't used to drinking alone without any interested parties (cough Momoi) to pace him, he had counted the beer cans left out when he returned to his apartment the day after that strange event. There hadn’t been _that_ many. He couldn't have been drunk enough to lose his judgement entirely. 

As much as he hated to acknowledge it, Aomine had been in control of his actions when he’d goaded Kagami into having sex with him. He had been sober enough to know what he wanted, and to take it. 

It had been hard to admit that to himself. There had been several days of denial involved, and then at the end, a lot of squirming and moaning in distress as he came to terms with a part of himself that he couldn't quite accept yet. But eventually he couldn't deny it any longer: some part of him had the hots for Kagami Taiga. Some part of him dreamed of red hair instead of blue, bulging muscles instead of soft skin, gruff moans instead of whispers. And no amount of Kuroko-focused corrective masturbation could force those sparks out of his head.

And eventually, Aomine found that he couldn't blame this on Kuroko's misdirection, either. Not after that semifinal game in the main university summer tournament, when Kuroko had, after being pressed hard by Midorima and Takao's team, been forced to finally reveal his new technique. 

Aomine had been present at this game, of course. Just like old times he and Momoi had arrived fashionably late and had ended up lurking just inside the door, leaning over a metal railing as they observed the game from above. 

Kuroko had chosen a strategic time to unveil his move. He had waited until his team was on defense, a time when even Takao, who had long since been "in the know" that Kuroko was working on something new, would let his guard down a little bit to focus on his own play. 

Takao, dribbling idly, approached the half-court line. Although his stance was relaxed, Aomine could tell from the way he turned his head to scan the court, looking it over in a series of quick, jerky glances, that he was using his hawk eye to create a 3D image of its current geography. In a few scant seconds, he would finish constructing this model, extract its weaknesses, and send the ball on to wherever it needed to go. Even Aomine had used to have trouble neutralizing this particular point guard's plays- the logical, comprehensive approach to offense that Takao and Midorima shared had always felt alien to his more intuitive and organic one. He was sure that Kagami must feel the same way. Kagami, who played so much like Aomine that it hurt sometimes, who could match him step for step until their basketball reached some kind of spiritual nirvana-esque level...

"Oh _shit_." Momoi said next to him, voice awed.

This uncharacteristic outburst of profanity drug Aomine out of his reverie, and in doing so he realized that his eyes had been resting on Kagami's ass. He promptly looked away.

"What?"

"Don't tell me you didn't see that."

Aomine looked down at the whole court this time, trying to figure out exactly what it was that had impressed Momoi so much. The ball had changed possession, that much was clear- Kagami must have intercepted it and gone for a fast break. He was still a few meters in front of his closest opponent, almost to the three point line. It had probably been a good play on the redhead's part, but Aomine didn't see what had been so unusual about it.

"See what?" 

Momoi sighed. "Dai-chan, stop slacking. You know it's your job to carefully watch all these games and then, at the important parts, explain what’s going on in layman’s terms.” 

"Since when has that been my job?"

"Since like the first year of high school! Jeez, you're really not paying attention to any of this, are you?"

"I'm paying attention to Tetsu."

A devious look crossed Momoi's face. "Okay then. Next time Midorin's team sets up, try and tell me where Kuroko-kun is on the court."

"Easy. I can always see him, you know. His misdirection doesn't work on me."

"Don’t be so sure about that!"

Kagami had made the layup that he had been heading towards earlier. It was a sign of how hassled his team was right then, Aomine supposed, that the big redhead hadn't dunked it just for the sake of showing off like he usually did. He didn't have time to dwell on this, though, because the possession had just changed again and Momoi was poking him in the shoulder, hissing that he needed to _pay attention_ this time!

And he did pay attention. Kuroko was in the back, marking their center for some reason. But when Aomine said as much to Momoi, she just smiled and pointed closer to the middle of the court. "Then who's that marking Takao?"

Aomine frowned down at the court. "Oh. I guess Tetsu moved up."

"Look at Yamanaka again," she said, naming the center that Kuroko had been beside earlier. 

The center that Kuroko was still beside. A second, entirely separate Kuroko. And somehow, before Aomine could even figure out what was going on, the ball had changed possession.

If it was even possible to explain this in layman's terms, Aomine sure as hell didn't know how to do it.

The game continued. Kuroko used his duplication only a few more times, each episode lasting no more than a few seconds. But Aomine never got used to seeing it. He got anxious. He wanted to leave. But Momoi didn't let him.

"How am I supposed to make strategies for Kuroko-kun and Kagamin if I don't have a good grasp of what their moves are?" Momoi said. "Come on, we're almost at the fourth quarter now. Let's stay until the end."

"Tetsu learned how to double himself. It's a completely different technique than I thought he was working on. There, now you understand it. Let's go."

" _Dai-chan._ " Momoi huffed. "You can leave whenever you want. I'm staying though."

"You manipulative bitch. You know I can't let you walk home alone in the dark."

"As if I _want_ to go home with someone who thinks I'm a bitch. Besides, I always walk around at night. It's fine."

But instead of leaving, Aomine just slumped down further on the railing. Momoi drove him freaking crazy sometimes, it was true. But if anything happened to her, that would... 

Well, in any case, he tried to look out for her when he could. 

Momoi continued to chatter, thinking out loud whenever Kuroko used his new move. "I think there are two primary ways he uses it. I understand now why he put off its debut until this game- it's particularly effective against Takao's hawk eye. Takao's style of play has always relied on his ability to see everything on the court. So, thinking that he sees Kuroko marking a much taller player instead of the person who's actually marking him lowers his guard a little, makes him think that he can pass it over there without fear of interception. But then instead of Kuroko, it's Tanigawa, and bam! Change of possession."

Aomine nodded into the railing, where he was resting his face against his elbow. Even if he had to be present in the gym, that didn't mean that he had to watch the game. Didn't have to see Kagami blitzing across the court, and know that Kuroko's trickery had nothing to do with the way his heart sped up to match his pace.

"So, that's the two-Kuroko style of play... or the two-someone-else style, because I may be wrong about this but it looks like Kuroko can also make himself look like one of his teammates temporarily if needed. There's also a one-Kuroko style of play that he uses on offense, when the Kuroko that people see is actually somebody else and the real Kuroko is misdirecting around like normal, connecting passes and-"

"Satsuki. Just stop," he mumbled into his elbow.

He wasn't sure whether or not she heard him. But in any case, the amount of commentary dropped to a minimum after that. After the game ended in a victory for Kuroko and Kagami, she didn't bring it up again.

But even if Aomine refused to talk about it, it remained on his mind all the same. How- seriously, _how-_ had things gone so far with Kagami without any of Kuroko's tricks being involved? He had been in love with Kuroko for _five goddamned years_. Kuroko had been his first love, his first kiss... the first person who had split his life into a "before meeting him" part and an "after meeting him" part. How had Kagami, who he'd also known for many years at that point, managed to change everything in such a short amount of time? Knowing that he had a rival for Kuroko should have made Aomine's feelings stronger, not more wishy-washy! 

It was the Springtime Cup that had been the problem, Aomine finally decided, desperate to find some kind of excuse, no matter how stretched, for his current predicament. Turning his feelings for Kuroko into a game had trivialized them, made him focus more on the game itself and its players, rather than the prize at the end. Aomine had fallen into this same trap before back in high school, the first time that he’d played Seirin. By all rights, he should have been pissed off after losing that game. He was Aomine. The only one who could beat him was him. But his memories of the struggle, of going head-to-head against Kagami and recognizing a player that could someday be a real match for him, had filled him with excitement more than anger. 

Because of Kuroko's stupid plans to "make him smile" or "enjoy basketball again" or whatever, he'd lost sight of the single-minded drive for victory that had been instilled into all of them back at Teiko. And, yeah, he was a big enough man to admit it: maybe that loss had been adaptive. But now, facing a change that might make him lose sight of Kuroko _himself_ … he couldn’t imagine a way that could end well.

And so, finally, after weeks of fighting battles in his head, Aomine made a resolution. 

 

 

_"i'm going to confess to tetsu today."_

Aomine didn't know why he had been so nervous to hit the send button on that text. It wasn't as if Kagami could have any reasonable objections to his plan. Aomine had won their last challenge, after all, even if it had gotten way the hell out of hand and they hadn't talked about it since. Giving him advance notice of his intentions was more of a courtesy than Kagami was due. 

Although, Kagami would probably interpret it as gloating. Aomine wasn’t trying to be a dick, he really wasn’t- by sending that text to Kagami, he just wanted to...

No matter how hard Aomine racked his brain, he was unable to come up with a satisfactory end to that thought. So he just let it lie. 

A few tense minutes passed before a response arrived. 

_“Okay.”_

Aomine grit his teeth. _“Okay”?_ Was that all he was going to get out of him?

_“thats all? no well wishes or nothing?”_

This time, Kagami answered back promptly. _“Doesn’t really matter either way. Tetsuya’s not going to say yes to you, you know.”_

_“and you think he’d say yes to you? ha.”_

_“Actually, I’m not sure about that either. Some weird stuff’s happened recently. It’s made me think.”_

Aomine frowned. Was that supposed to be a reference to their adventures in drunken frottage a while back? Wasn’t it against the rules or something to bring that up? 

In any case, that was one topic of conversation that he did not want to pursue. He changed the subject. 

_“yeah whatever. still feel like ive got to tell him. ill let you know how it goes.”_

_“Like I care.”_

_“don’t play like you’re not interested.”_

_“fuck you.”_

Aomine generously let him have the last word.

 

 

The problem was that, now that he had told someone that he was going to make a confession, even if that person was a big idiot like Kagami whose opinions Aomine didn’t really care about, that meant that he actually had to do it. And so the next day, Aomine found himself trudging, basketball in hand, down the steps to Kuroko’s apartment. He would invite Kuroko to shoot some hoops, he’d decided. The shadow probably would think that was weird, but since it was Aomine, he would come along anyway. Because they were friends, right? And then Aomine would tell him. And then Kuroko would be his again, and he could put all this recent shit with Kagami behind him.

Aomine nodded his head, resolute. Right. 

He knocked on the door and was admitted in. Nigou jumped up on him, nearly catching enough air to give him a good lick on the face, before Kuroko was able to restrain him. Luckily, Kagami wasn’t in right then. Aomine spun his basketball, made his proposition, and a few minutes later, the two of them were down at the court at an elementary school near their house.

“It’s strange for you to want to play basketball with me, Aomine-kun. When I first saw you at the door, I assumed you had come looking for Kagami-kun.”

Something was weird with Kuroko’s eyes right then, like for once Aomine was the ghost and Kuroko could see right through him. The only defense was to look away. So Aomine did.

“C’mon, Tetsu. I came here to play basketball, not to talk about idiots.” Aomine tossed him the ball. “Let’s see if you still remember what I taught you back then.”

They started out shooting around for a while, an exercise which soon evolved into a colossally unsportsmanlike game of one-on-one, in which Aomine pulled no punches but Kuroko cheated mercilessly. After exactly 40 minutes, Kuroko made his way to a grassy patch beside the court and collapsed, stating that there was no point in exercising any longer than the length of an official game. Aomine sat down at his side and was just opening his mouth to make fun of him when Kuroko found a way to preemptively shut him up.

Removing his face from where it had been buried in the grass, Kuroko asked Aomine a question.

“How is your calf doing these days, Aomine-kun? Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t your rest and recovery period end just yesterday?”

Aomine scooted away from him, sputtering. “Wha- how do you- fucking _Satsuki_! I told her not to tell you!”

“Momoi-san didn’t tell me anything. In fact, the two of us have not spoken in several weeks.” If Kuroko sounded a little sadder than usual, a little more tired, Aomine was too preoccupied to register it on a conscious level. 

“Then how the fuck could you know?”

“Do you really think you need to tell me things for me to know them?”

Aomine listened to those words, took in the not-particularly-anything expression on Kuroko’s face that was always so eloquent all the same, and suddenly he understood. 

He’d thought he’d been keeping his feelings a secret for all these years, but of _course_ Kuroko had seen right through that. He knew that Aomine had never gotten over him. He knew the real reason why Aomine had invited him out to play that day. And he had never once done a thing to encourage him. 

_Damn it, that Kagami was right. Neither of us ever had a chance._

That was what Aomine thought. 

“Tetsu. I love you. I want you back.”

That was what Aomine said. 

A sigh. “I knew that, too.”

Slowly, Kuroko pulled himself up from his belly-flop sprawl and sat up, wrapping his hands around his knees. Something about that position made him look… not _vulnerable_ , Aomine had been on the receiving end of Kuroko’s oft-sadistic brand of confidence a few too many times to make that mistake, but definitely _small._  

“You have to understand, Aomine,” he began, keeping his voice on a short leash. “What we had back at Teiko… I did want that, at the time. I really did have feelings for you. But it’s been years. We’re both different now.”

Aomine had expected this response. To be honest with himself, he had never truly expected anything _other_ than this response. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. 

“Doesn’t matter. Still love you.” Aomine stood up, brushed the grass off his clothes, took a deep breath. He had said this much, he might as well continue. “And that night after nationals our last year in Teiko? Best sex I’ve ever had in my life. But since it hurt you, I’d take it back if I could, no hesitation.” 

Kuroko stiffened but said nothing.

“No hesitation,” Aomine concluded. “Just… just wanted you to know that.”

Finally, Kuroko spoke “You’re calling it sex now,” he mumbled. “That’s a change.”

“I guess it is.” 

Silence stretched between them for a moment as Aomine counted his breaths. This was his cue to go. He had confessed, and Kuroko had rejected him. There was nothing left to say.

But even if it was past time for words, Aomine couldn’t shut off his thoughts. Torrents of little moments crashed inside his skull, five years worth, all of the seconds and minutes that had built up his feelings for Kuroko. Like that first time he’d heard a basketball bouncing in the third-string gym and hadn’t immediately seen the person handling it. The words Kuroko had said at the time: "Because I love basketball, I won't give up." The first time Kuroko had called Aomine his friend. The sleepless nights spent staring at the ceiling, lying in bed and just _wanting_ him. That memory he wasn't allowed to remember, when he'd flattened Kuroko against a cheap hotel bed and finally felt the warmth of his skin.

Then, how it had felt to be alone. To watch Kuroko grow and change in a choppy, stop-motion stream, never knowing what was going on in the months between their games, too prideful to go find out. Hating basketball. Hating himself.

And then that pivotal moment after the final buzzer rang during Touou's first match with Seirin. Realizing that he had lost. That sleepless night afterwards spent replaying every second of the game over and over again in his head, lying in bed and just wanting to _beat_ them. Kuroko, and Kagami too. The look on Imayoshi's face when he showed up at practice the next day and stayed until the end. 

And in the years that followed. Teaching Kuroko to shoot, that surreal feeling when his friend made his first basket. Momoi smiling more and more. Playing games with his old teammates, becoming a little part of everyone’s world again, expanding his own world in turn. Making his way onto the pro leagues, seeing Kuroko, Kagami, and Momoi in the bleachers during tryouts, cheering him on. Loving basketball again. Loving Kuroko. 

Was there even a difference between the history of Aomine’s feelings for Kuroko and the history of his life? The two had grown together for so long that now their roots had tangled. Aomine couldn’t imagine a future where his heart didn’t skip a beat when Kuroko entered the room. There were five years of conditioned responses the dump at this point, and he didn’t know where to begin. 

 

 

The next morning dawned grey and hazy. It was good weather for moping, and that thought alone tempted Aomine to stay in bed for another ten minutes or hours or whatever. But then his cell phone rang with that stupid pop song that Momoi had programmed as her personal ring tone, and Aomine grit his teeth. He had left his cell in the kitchen.

Normally he just wouldn't pick it up. But Momoi had been acting weird and sad recently, and what was the point of Aomine’s existence right then if he couldn't even be a halfway decent friend? So, fighting his body's protests all the way, Aomine ripped himself out of bed and trudged over to where the phone lay, quivering slightly as it rang, on his countertop.

"Satsuki. You better be bleeding out in a ditch or something, because it's way to early in the morning for-" 

"Dai-chan got out of bed just for me! I'm proud of you. You didn't answer my calls yesterday, so I assumed that you had finally gone to have a talk with Kuroko-kun. Three years too late, in my opinion."

Aomine groaned silently and flopped over on the couch. Was he really that bad at keeping secrets? How exactly was it, then, that everybody and their brother knew everything about his life all the time?

"Don't take it personally!" Momoi's chipper voice intruded on the line again. "It's not your fault that you're super predictable."

"God damn it, Satsuki."

She responded with a little chuckle. "Alright then, so now that you're up, you should leave the house. Take a run or something. Go see a movie. I'm at my internship right now so I can't come bust your chops myself, but I promise. It'll make you feel better if you find something to do."

Aomine glowered at the phone. He didn't need instructions from freaking _Momoi_ on how to handle the Kuroko situation. Yeah, she always said that he was so predictable, but even if she knew what he was going to do, it wasn't as if she could possibly understand how he felt.

"This is stupid," he said, finally. "I'm going back to bed."

"No, Dai-chan! You should not, under _any_ circumstances-"

Aomine hung up the phone.

It was the first decisive action that Aomine had made in nearly a day, and it felt good for a few moments. But soon the slight rush that it had given him started to fade, and the reality of having to live without hope of Kuroko wanting him back settled in.

Aomine considered going back to sleep again as he'd threatened. At best, it would make him forget his problems for a while- which might be okay, because this was probably one of those times where thriving was impossible and survival was all that could be expected. At worst, it would piss of Momoi, and there was even a bright side to that. Sometimes she looked really funny when enraged. 

But the more he thought about it, the more he came to the conclusion that Momoi was probably right. As usual. So, with a sigh, Aomine picked up the phone again. Kagami's number was listed second from the top on his "frequent contacts" list at that point, he noticed with surprise, jumping up from the sixth position two months ago and the third position earlier that week. Momoi was always and would always be first, but up until then Kuroko had been second. He wasn't sure how he felt about this change.

He hit send and listened to the phone ring, once, twice. On a sudden whim, Aomine looked at the clock on his microwave. It was 7:15 in the fucking morning, he realized. There was no way Kagami would be up this early on a weekend. Even the damn _birds_ weren't up this early. Well, that was a lie, but still...

He expected to get the answering machine. It wasn't as if Aomine would have picked up for Kagami anytime before, like, noon, he reasoned, so there was no reason to expect otherwise when the tables were turned. So when Kagami picked up the phone and slurred out a sleepy "hello", it caught Aomine off guard. 

He didn’t stop to think before speaking.

"I tore my gastrocnemius. It sucks. I hate it." _What the hell am I saying?_ “This is Aomine, by the way."

"Oh. Sorry to hear that." Kagami tried to bite back a yawn, but Aomine could still hear the edges of it over the phone. "Does that mean you can't play basketball now?"

Aomine snorted. "This happened back in April. Keep up. It's healed now. Well, healing."

"Oh. Okay. So you wanna play or something?”

“Yeah. You down?”

Kagami chuckled. “I don’t know, man. Can you handle it? I don’t want to waste my time, if it turns out you started sucking.”

_I guess I must have been ‘wasting my time’, then, all of those games I played with you._ The thought popped into Aomine’s mind. As well as _even a person that sucks could beat you_. The usual bluster. But instead he paused a moment.

Aomine _was_ injured. There was no escaping that harsh truth. His leg hurt like a bitch, had been hurting so long that he almost forgot what it was like to not be in pain. And yeah, his game had suffered. Even playing with Kuroko yesterday had drained his stamina a little, and that was _Kuroko_. If he played with Kagami now, his oldest rival, the only person who could beat him when he was at his best, chances were that he would be frustrated and humiliated and hurt again.

Aomine would never have considered going up against anyone else in his state. Yet as soon as his injury had been cleared, he had gone ahead and called the redhead anyway. There had to be a reason for that, right? 

He grit his teeth. “Just get your ass to the court, Kagami. I’ll be fine.”

And since he told _Bakagami_ that he would be fine, that meant that, somehow, he would find a way to be.

 


	10. Kise's Hunger Games

As a near-life-long manager of various basketball teams, Momoi knew a thing or two about caring for injuries. The easiest types to treat were surface wounds like cuts- a little Neosporin, a bandaid, some tape, and the injured party was ready to hit the court again- but Momoi could hold her own against other common injuries well. Muscular strains, concussions, even that time Haizaki had elbowed Kise across the face during a practice match, knocking him out cold and possibly breaking his nose, Momoi had been skillful enough with the first aid that Kise hadn’t been left with any lasting disfigurement. She still remembered the relief in his agent’s voice when she called Momoi shortly after the incident, and how in her gratitude she’d pulled some strings to get her some exclusive prints of the idol Momoi had been into at the time. 

(She still had those photos somewhere, come to think of it, hidden away in that box with her middle school yearbook, a few random data sheets, some gifted lucky items, and that popsicle stick that Kuroko had given her way back then. Momoi had a policy of never throwing happy memories away.)

Of course, for some injuries, especially those occurring around the time of important games or tournaments, the treatment was hard to swallow. The thing about boys was that they always had to act macho, and shoo the pain away as if it were nothing. Momoi was as thick-skinned as the next teenager- how could she not be, after being friends with Aomine all her life?-, but she still understood that sometimes pain was a good thing. It revealed when you were going too far. But no matter how many times she told the boys this, usually after benching them for their own good, they never accepted it. Even when their haste to get back onto the court resulted in re-injuries and worsening conditions, they never developed a healthy respect for their own pain. 

Momoi was careful and graceful and, most importantly, not a high-level athlete. She had rarely had any physical injuries, at least not since her more rough-and-tumble childhood days. But she had been born with the kind of maturity that enabled her to define her limits and heed them, to learn valuable lessons from times of stress. 

Knowing this about herself, Momoi had decided to classify the complicated emotions currently clouding her atmosphere as a physical wound. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure that she would be able to deal with it productively. Her conversation with Kuroko had been the method of injury, or maybe that had been Aomine's confession that morning in her apartment. In any case, rather than a gradual insight into a complex and longstanding issue flowing beneath the surface of her social group, she re-imagined these events as a sudden burst of pain, equivalent to a twisted ankle. 

Molding her current struggles into such a simple system made it easier for Momoi to figure out the kind of treatment required. Obviously, bandages and ice packs wouldn't cut it this time. But the principles of sound recovery- lots of rest, with exertion only as tolerated until the body worked its way back up to its usual level of function- still applied. 

In short, Momoi needed to avoid Kuroko. And so she did.

It was actually easier than she thought it would be, considering that up until that point, the pair had seen each other more or less every day. But once she had cut out their Tuesday-and-Friday jogs and the obligatory home visits whenever she came to see Aomine, her chances of running into him dwindled significantly. 

Of course, there was still the problem of basketball, with her position as unofficial manager all but requiring her to meet with him every once in a while to discuss data and strategies. She had seen him three times over the past few weeks for just this reason. Twice they had crossed paths, supposedly by accident, in Aomine's apartment, although Aomine would later report that Kuroko had come up looking specifically for her. The third time, Kuroko had even gone so far as to show up at Momoi’s place, a twenty-minute train ride from anywhere that he might have a valid reason to be. At first she tried to pretend that she wasn’t in, but he had loitered around on her doorstep long enough that she eventually relented. She invited him in, and theyshared the most awkward half hour of tea and basketball gossip ever. 

No matter how much Momoi pondered, she could never figure out what Kuroko was _getting_ out of these meetings, or why he continued to initiate them. Momoi could think of many methods of sharing basketball information with one another that would never require them to meet face to face - email was a wonderful thing, for one, and, barring that, she would have been perfectly content to meet up with only Kagami and let him and Kuroko discuss things on their own later. She had actually sought the redhead out for several such meetings already over the past few weeks, and as far as Momoi could tell, things had worked just fine. 

If she didn’t know Kuroko so well, Momoi might have thought that he was lonely. That he actually missed her, and was reaching out to fix their relationship. But that couldn’t be it. For all of the years and years of their messed-up friendship, Momoi had been the one going after him. But every conversation she’d initiated, every declaration of affection she’d given him, even every time she’d gone in for the hug, he had rebuffed her, in that oh-so-polite but oh-so-hurtful way. That oh-so-Kuroko way.

People had used to make fun of her, even, thinking that she didn’t realize a rejection when she saw one. But Momoi wasn’t that stupid. She had just been hopeful, she supposed, that one day Kuroko would learn to actually like having her around. That she would wear him down or something. 

But now, there was no longer any reason to crave his attention. He had rejected Aomine, so there was no longer a strategic reason to pretend to love him. He had betrayed her and the status quo, and so there wasn’t even a reason to genuinely _like_ him. She had hated people for lesser offenses, before. 

But when Momoi looked deep down into the part of her heart marked “Kuroko”, hoping to find it entirely empty and deflated and, by doing so, justify her decision to sever all ties with him, she found that it continued to brim. And no matter what she did, she couldn’t make those feelings go away. 

 

Kagami and Kuroko’s next game was going to be a difficult one. Up until that point, they had been able to avoid playing any of their former Seirin teammates. They’d gone up against a number of their old opponents, of course- Midorima was the only member of the Generation of Miracles who had continued on to college ball (Murasakibara was off at some fruity French school studying the art of pastry-making, and Akashi had quit basketball after high school, devoting his energy into establishing a corporate empire powerful enough to take down his own father’s- he could be a little creepy about revenge, sometimes), but most of the teams they'd played against had boasted one or more familiar faces. Just the previous week, there had been a surprising upset when Hanamiya's new team had pretty much beaten them into the ground. That had been a heavy blow.

These rivalries were many years old at this point, well-worn, comfortable. However, the next's week game was going to pose an interesting challenge to them, considering that due to a poorly-timed injury to their opponents' regular shooting guard, Seirin’s former captain Hyuuga Junpei was probably going to be a starter for it.

"Are you kidding me right now?" Kagami sighed, slumping down to bury his face in big palms. He, Momoi, and a burgeoning portfolio of data sheets were sitting in a café, waiting for the attendant to bring them the slab of chocolate cake that was Momoi's customary payment for helping the college team out. "That'll be so weird. I mean, we'll still go hard; it'd just piss him off if he didn't, but... damn, that's probably the last guy on the Seirin team I'd want to go up against."

"It's not a sure thing that the coach will put him in," Momoi reminded him. "Just a probability. There's a third year who also plays his position, Kawaguchi-kun- if they need to tighten up their defense at any point, they'd be better off playing him rather than Hyuuga. But Hyuuga's the all-around better player, so I wouldn't be surprised to see him in the lineup."

Her attempts to cheer Kagami up only seemed to stress him out more. "Damn it. Just, damn it. I was looking forward to this game, since his school's pretty strong, but if Hyuuga's going to play..." Kagami shook his head. "Well, I don't know if you'd know this, but whenever our team was having a tough time back then, he had this habit of kind of... changing his personality."

"'Clutch Time Hyuuga.'" Momoi nodded. "The more severe version of regular Hyuuga."

"Right! Exactly!" Kagami pounded a hand against the table. "And Clutch Time Hyuuga is the absolute worst. I know I need to beat him, but if I score too much, he'll yell at me and threaten me and... you know. Say mean things about my eyebrows."

Kagami looked so much like a pouty little kid right then that Momoi had to bite back a smile. "Well, just think about what would happen if you _didn't_ score enough against him. Who's scarier, Hyuuga-kun or Kuroko-kun?"

"Tetsuya, every time," Kagami said with a sigh. "Thanks for the pep talk, Momoi. Now, what else have you got for me?"

They continued their discussion, with Momoi going over the strengths and weaknesses of all of the players they were likely to encounter in the game as well as a number of strategies that she knew the opposing coach favored. Since she was convinced that it was better to send him off with too much data than not quite enough, they stayed at that table for more than an hour and a half. But when they'd finally finished up the productive portion of their chat and, under usual circumstances, would have starting packing up to go, Kagami hesitated. 

"Um, Momoi," he started. "If I asked you a personal question, do you think you could not make yourself mad at me?"

Momoi struggled her way through the grammar (even after all these years, Kagami still had a habit of messing up his Japanese when he was under a lot of stress) and shrugged. "That depends on the question, I suppose. What did you want to ask?"

"Well... I guess... I want to know what you did to upset Tetsuya so much." Instantly he flinched and threw up his hands. "Wait, wait, that came out wrong. Whatever it was, it was probably his fault. It's just, he's seemed kind of and closed-off recently, and he gets mad whenever I mention you in front of him. I just want to know what happened, I guess. If you'll tell me."

Momoi listened to this rambling rant with a frown on her face. Given a choice, she would have preferred not to have this conversation with Kagami. One wrong move, and she might say something that would make the redhead so uncomfortable that _he_ would start to avoid her too- she had never wanted to know a single thing about his sex life, but the fact remained that she _did_ , and that in a weird way, all of her problems and Kuroko's were stemming from that knowledge right then. On the other hand, refusing to answer Kagami's question could also make things awkward, and in her heart of hearts, she suspected that talking about it might make her feel better.

She decided to give it a shot. "It's not completely his fault. I'm probably overreacting. But I don't know. What happened was..." Momoi paused for a moment, both to steady her nerves and to try and figure out how to phrase the issue delicately. "I discovered a new aspect of Kuroko's personality recently," she said, and then hurried to explain herself further. "Well, maybe not a _new_ aspect. I've always known that he can be a little cold and manipulative when it serves his purposes. That he likes to play with people. But I never realized that he did this with his friends as well as with his opponents."

It made her a little nervous, the intensity with which Kagami was staring at her. "You too? I mean, he's been doing that with me forever, or at least I'm starting to think so, but aren’t you smarter than that?"

"I've never been able to figure out what's going on in Kuroko-kun's head," Momoi admitted. "Everyone else, sure, but never him. I used to think that was why I liked him so much. Now, it just scares me, what he’s capable of. He didn’t even do anything to me, just to some of his other friends, but I still don't know if I can trust him anymore."

Kagami opened his mouth, paused, closed it again. Momoi could see that he was struggling for words. And so she waited, wondering what it was that he was trying to say.

"You already know everything that's been going on, don't you? About Aomine and me... Aomine and my thing."

Momoi felt herself starting to blush, and she ducked her head. "I didn't want to know, I promise! It's just that Daiki's too stupid to figure anything out for himself, so he tells me everything..."

"Don't worry about it. Aomine's a dumbass; that's all you needed to say. But, uh," Kagami began, "does that mean you really know _everything_?"

"I've forbidden Daiki from drinking alone until he's thirty," Momoi said, responding to the most pertinent of the implied questions there. “Even though I still privately blame Kuroko-kun.”

"Oh.” Kagami colored. “Um, sorry you had to hear about that."

"You and me both."

They sat in silence for a second. Momoi pushed around the last few crumbs of her chocolate cake, feeling her stomach churn with the turn their conversation had taken. 

“Personally, I don’t know who to blame at this point. Or if blame is even the word I’m really looking for here,” Kagami began. “Like you said, it doesn’t sound right to call it Aomine’s fault, since I realize now that Kuroko had been trying to make something like this happen for a long time. But it also kind of understand now why Kuroko did what he did. I mean, I was mad at him too, at first. I wished he would have talked to me like a normal person and just _told_ methat he wasn’t interested. But I figure he really was trying to be... I dunno, gentle or something, in his own way. He likes trying to solve people's problems for them." Kagami laughed. "Like, would he really have fought so hard against Touou during that first Interhigh, if he wasn't trying to shake Aomine out of that rut he was in? Make him care about basketball again?"

"Kuroko-kun did that for his own reasons," Momoi responded, voice flat. "He wanted to prove that his type of basketball was superior to Aomine's, and nothing more."

"And that's partially true," Kagami said with a shrug. "But I still can't accept that there wasn't any kindness there."

Momoi didn't know how to respond to that. And so she didn't. Instead, she stood and picked up her bag, adjusting the strap over her shoulder. "It's been nice talking to you, Kagami-kun. I hope you can make good use of the data sheets. Let me know if you have any questions- otherwise, I'll see you at the game."

"Thanks, Momoi," Kagami said. He rose to his feet as well and reached for the folder full of notes. "You're a lifesaver as always. And consider talking to Kuroko, okay? He really hasn’t been himself since you guys starting fighting.”

“I’ll think about it.” 

“Because I know he really misses you,” Kagami pressed. 

“I’ll think about it.”

 

The next evening, Momoi was tidying her apartment when she heard the doorbell ring. And then ring again immediately. And again.

She looked down at her scrubber and sighed. There was no mistaking who the visitor was.

“Momoicchi! Let me in, I really need your help!”

Momoi trudged over to the door. She wasn’t in the mood to deal with Kise’s crazy right then. She had been thinking long and hard over what to the about the Kuroko situation, but no matter how long she waited, no matter how much emotional first aid she administered, she was still angry at him. She was still boiling, and freezing with it, and she didn’t know how to make it _stop_. Momoi highly doubted that she could be good company right then.

But for some reason, because of some personality flaw or whatever, she couldn’t turn Kise away. He was a friend and, more importantly, he was blissfully unaware of the shitstorm that had just gone down with Aomine and the others. Who knows? Maybe it would be therapeutic, to get her mind off of everything for a while. 

She opened the door, and Kise came crashing into her like a tidal wave. 

“Momoichiiii! Yukiocchi dumped me again, what do I do?”

There was blonde hair in her face. Some of it got stuck to her lips, and she she blew it away. “You tell me, dummy,” she said, voice gentle. “What did you do the last five times he broke up with you?”

“But it’s only been four times! Not five! And the last time was more than a year ago!” Kise continued to sob into her shoulder. Momoi brought her arms up to encircle him, rubbing his back encouragingly. Kise was overdramatic at times, it was true. But even when he made mountains out of molehills, she couldn’t help but feel for him.

“If you got through it then, you can get through it now.”

Kise sniffed. “But I only got through it last time because you went and scolded Yukiocchi for me until he apologized. Hey, is there any chance you could do that again?”

Momoi shook her head. “I only talked to him last time because the fight was partly my fault. I didn’t know he was so against you going the acting route instead of more school. And since I was the one who wormed you into that closed audition, I thought I owed him an explanation.”

“An explanation?” Kise looked up at Momoi for a moment, a quizzical expression on his face. “The way he told it to me, I imagined that you had yelled at him and maybe even hit him until he was forced to accept my life choices.”

“That may have been part of it too,” Momoi admitted. “So, what are you fighting about this time?”

“It’s not just a _fight_ , Momoicchi. We actually _broke up._ He kicked me out of the apartment and everything- I’ve got all of my earthly possessions here in this bag.” He kicked at the old sports bag at his feet. 

Momoi raised an eyebrow. There was no way that all of Kise’s earthly possessions could fit in there. Heck, she would even be surprised if all of his hair and beauty products alone could fit. But she wisely declined to comment on that. There were larger mysteries at play. 

“But isn’t it your own apartment? Because you’re, you know, the one with an income who pays the bills, and Kasa-kun is just freeloading until he pays off his student loans?”

Confusion spread across Kise’s moment as he considered Momoi’s argument. “But… we both live there. So it’s both of our apartment.”

As usual, it seemed like logic wasn’t going to get her anywhere. And so Momoi racked her brains for a plan B. “Alright Ki-chan. It’s late, so you should stay here for the night. We’ll have a sleepover, okay?”

The blonde brightened up immediately. “I knew I could count on you, Momoicchi! Ah, I mean, thank you for your hospitality,” he said, tacking on a formal bow to the end of his sentence. “It’ll be nice not having to sleep in a train station and get mugged and probably murdered.”

Upset as Momoi still was, she had to crack a smile at the image. Kise wouldn’t make it for a minute as a homeless person. Luckily for him, his celebrity status meant that if such a future ever came to pass, it would not even _take_ a minute before one of his lovestruck tween fanscame to the rescue and adopted him as her pet or something. 

“It’s nothing. Now go put that bag inside- the sooner you’re settled in, the sooner we can go to the convenience store to eat snacks.”

 

It was a sign of Kise’s distress, Momoi thought, that he couldn’t even accomplish so simple a task as picking out consolation snacks without struggling. They had been in the little corner store for nearly twenty minutes now as the blonde prowled the aisles, picking up packages and bottles and putting them back, looking around listlessly for something he couldn’t identify.

Momoi tried to make some suggestions. She knew that Kise liked chocolate, so at first she had steered him towards the candy bars. But then he had made a big fuss about how he couldn’t control himself so he would eat a _lot_ of chocolate, and how it would make his skin break out, and how that would somehow inevitably lead to the fiery ruin of his career. After that, Momoi decided to just stand back and let him do his thing. 

“I don’t even know what this is,” Kise complained at one point, showing Momoi a colorful little packet labelled ‘fun fun fish snacks!’. "You'd expect a snack made of fish, but then there's a picture of a cow on it..."

Momoi inspected the item, squinting against the rainbow of bright colors on the packaging. "Um, I think that's supposed to be a whale, rather than a cow."

"Ah." Kise looked at the object again. "I suppose so. So these are whale meat, then?"

"No, I think whales are an endangered-"

"That's cool! I think I'll try them."

Momoi swallowed down the correction that had stuck to the tip of her tongue and mentally repeated that evening’s mantra: _Just stand back and let him do his thing…_

It took a few more minutes, but eventually Kise had managed to fill a basket with various snacks. They went up to the cashier (a gangly, freckled teen who looked frankly overwhelmed by the vastness of their purchase), paid, and headed out into the night, walking in the direction of Momoi's apartment.

Kise started on a package of cheesy chips first, munching on them in sad-eyed contemplation. "These are terrible," he eventually pronounced, jolting Momoi out of the string of pale blue thoughts that had sprung up during Kise's silence. "The ones in America tasted a lot better."

"They were probably less healthy, though."

"Probably." Kise dusted the cheese residue of his fingers and poked at his stomach. "After I got back from America, the first thing Yukiocchi said was that I had gotten fat. Maybe I did get fat, a little. But all the food there just tastes so good!"

Momoi creased her brow. She knew that Kasamatsu hadn't wanted Kise to go overseas in the first place, and that he had still probably been mad about that, but still. Calling him fat was a little harsh. "Kasa-kun is always so mean. It's amazing that you've been able to put up with him for so long."

Kise shrugged. "Aominecchi's meaner, but here you guys are. Eighteen years and still friends."

Momoi was forced to acknowledge his logic. "I guess you're right."

They were nearing Momoi's apartment now, but the night was fine and there was a vacant bench like right there, so the two of them by unspoken agreement decided to sit outside for a while. Momoi’s backpack, in which Kise's convenience store loot had been neatly tucked, took most of the bench, but Momoi didn't mind. Especially after he handed her a popsicle. 

"It's cherry. I know that's your favorite."

Momoi smiled. "Thanks, Ki-chan."

They munched for a little while, chatting intermittently about some of the details of Kise and Kasamatsu's most recent falling out. None of the information was all that new or interesting, Momoi was forced to admit. Kise had just found out that he was going to have to relocate for a few months to shoot a story arc for his new drama. Not anywhere near as far as America this time, just to some mountainous and mostly uninhabited area a couple of hours inland, but still Kasamatsu was pissed off. 

Or rather, as Kise explained at length, Kasamatsu was pissed off, Kise felt defensive, neither of them could take it, their home was unlivable, and therefore Momoi was sitting on a weather-worn wooden bench, shivering against a gust of wind as the blonde sniffled and stuffed his face with fish snacks beside her.

Speaking of the fish snacks...

"These are actually really good," Kise said, sounding surprised. "I never imagined I would like the taste of whale; I thought it'd be too fatty."

_It's probably tuna or something,_ Momoi thought. _Tuna, or... some other kind of cheap fish. I saw some cod at the store the other day that, per kilogram, was 35 yen cheaper than tuna, even though it tastes pretty much as good..._

Momoi’s phone rang, jerking her out of her calculations. She looked down at the name and then silenced it, figuring that _that_ guy could sit and sweat for a little while longer before she called him back.

"I should get some more of this. I think Yukiocchi would like it a lot, maybe I'll make him try some once we get back together."

Momoi sighed inwardly. "Didn't you say that you'd broken up for good this time?"

"Well, yeah," Kise said, popping another crunchy handful of fish bits into his mouth. "But that doesn't mean we won't get back together." He looked over at Momoi, raised his eyebrows at the exasperation he saw on her face. "But I'm really mad this time! It'll be a long time before I take him back."

Ordinarily, Momoi would have found this lack of precision annoying. Call her old fashioned, but when talking with others, she appreciated knowing just what they meant when they spoke- otherwise, what the point of even trying to communicate? But this time, surprisingly, she felt herself just as intrigued as she was annoyed. 

"How do you know that you two will get back together? It sounds like Kasa-kun really hurt you. Why don't you just go find someone else?"

Kise looked hurt. "Momoicchi, I thought you were on my side."

"I am!" she said. "I just..." she ran a hand through the lengths of her hair as she wondered what she was trying to say. "I guess I just don't understand your relationship with Kasa-kun that well."

It had sounded like a lame explanation to Momoi's ears, but Kise seemed to take it seriously, eyes alert behind a string of gummy fruit. "I mean, it's not like I understand it either," he said at last. "It's been, like, lots of years now. More than two years, right? You know we used to have this kind of stern-sempai-slash-unruly-kouhai dynamic, but I'd thought we'd gotten over that. By my high school graduation, I thought that we were _solid_. But then I started having to travel for work, and it's like I'm fifteen again and he's angry at me all the time."

Momoi nodded, settling her face into a sympathetic look as she licked a few errant drips off the bottom of her popsicle. 

"And it sucks. But it's also different now, you know? Because we've been together all this time, and I know that he understands me a little bit and cares about what happens to us... but then sometimes he gets like this. And I don't know what to do to make him happy." Kise started plowing into a pack of chocolate wafers, which muffled his voice as he continued to speak. "I don't think I've ever been this frustrated before. But at the same time, I keep seeing this future where me and Yukiocchi have finally got things figured out, where we're both working adults and live in a house and have a dog or some kids or something, and I get the feeling that I have to keep on going, you know? Like no matter what happens, we need to find a way to be together, because otherwise everything will be boring and not even worth it."

Momoi imagined Kise and Kasamatsu as a pair of white-haired old men for a moment, sitting next to each other in faded chairs and bickering as a swarm of grandchildren played around their ankles. She smiled. Such a scene wasn't hard to picture. For a moment she wondered what Kuroko would be like later in his life, not as an old man, maybe in his thirties. He'd probably look nice. He'd probably be the same mixture of peaceful and unpredictable that had attracted Momoi in the first place, probably still give her that feeling that there was always something left to learn about him. 

But she abandoned that train of thought in a hurry. What Kuroko decided to be like in the future was none of her concern, since at least for the moment she had decided to sever all ties with him.

"That's cute," Momoi commented. 

"It's not cute. It's weird," Kise said, with a self-deprecating laugh. "But thanks for listening."

"No problem." With a final slurp, Momoi finished off her popsicle. She pointed towards the nearest trashcan, a mischievous smile on her face. "Hey, bet you can’t copy this. Formless shoot, level Satsuki-point-two.”

But before she could even line the shot up, she felt the stick slip between her fingers. She looked over at Kise to find a look of disapproval on his face. "There's something written there, you know," he said, brandishing the popsicle stick as if it were a weapon. "You should never throw these things away until you've read them. Sometimes the prizes are good, and you even get a discount or whatever!”

He flipped it over, scanned the writing for a few moments, and returned the stick to Momoi. "Look at that, you won a free popsicle for next time! It's the very beginning of summer, so I'd keep that. You can use it later."

Momoi accepted the stick. Kise was right. The very first word on the stick said "winner!", followed by a few lines of text detailing exactly what she had won (any popsicle of the same brand of an equal or lesser value, as it were). 

"Yeah, I guess I can." Momoi smiled. "Thanks, Ki-chan!"

"No problem." 

 

Eventually the mountain of snacks dwindled into a mere bump, and the two of them decided to head back to Momoi's apartment. She set out the spare futon (unwashed since Aomine's last visit, but she wasn't about to tell Kise that) and a towel for her guest and wished him pleasant dreams. She then retreated to her own room and pulled out her phone, intent on dealing with that missed-call situation from before.

Momoi hit the "call back" button. As expected, the recipient picked up on the very first ring. "Momoi-san? Is that you?" she heard the gruff male's voice say. 

"Yes, Kasa-kun. It's me. And Ki-chan's here safe and sound, if that's what you're calling to ask me about," Momoi replied, feeling that the two of them were past the point of formalities. 

A sigh on the other end of the line. "Thank God." 

Momoi grit her teeth. "If you're so worried about him, why not just call him directly?"

"Didn't Ryouta tell you anything? We broke up. I can't call him anymore."

"Don't be stupid,” Momoi said. If Kasamatsu was allowed to talk to her in that customarily angry way of his, Momoi figured she was at least entitled to a little frustration. “You already know that the two of you are getting back together soon. Why draw all this out?"

“We’re not getting back together this time. I was serious.”

Momoi gripped her phone, about ready to fling it, along with all of Kasamatsu and Kise’s relationship drama, across the room. Why did boys have to be so _stupid_? “Just because he has to go off for a few days or weeks sometimes to film his dramas? He’s not doing it to spite you, you know. It’s his job. Neither of you would have any money if he refused.”

“Hey, who said you get to act like I’m being the unreasonable one?” Kasamatsu said, voice bristling. “If it really were just a few weeks or whatever, I’d be okay with that. But these days he’s away more often than he’s home, and everything feels _wrong_. It’s not like I want to break up with him, but…”

Kasamatsu trailed off, thinking, for a few moments. 

“Why am I even talking to you?” he finally asked himself. “This is our business. I just wanted to make sure Ryouta found somewhere to spend the night. Since it seems like he did, I’ll be hanging up now.”

Kise and Kasamatsu were still among the most infuriating people that Momoi had ever known, but she supposed that Kasamatsu’s argument made sense, a little. Gradually, she released her death grip on the phone. “Relationships are hard, you know,” she said. “Even if Ki-chan wasn’t an actor, this could have happened anyway. He might not have gotten into the university you wanted him to go to. He might have gotten a school offer or a job offer far away. Sometimes, when you’re in a situation like this, you have to make sacrifices.”

Kasamatsu tch’ed. “Why would I make sacrifices for that asshole?”

“I don’t know. Why would you?”

A laugh. A pause. A groan, packed with anger and frustration, and Momoi knew that her work there was done. “ _Okay,_ Momoi. Okay. I’ll call him tomorrow. Don’t let him do anything stupid until then.”

Momoi hadn’t even had a chance to respond before she heard a small click on the other end of the line, signaling the end of the call. She might have liked to know how Kasamatsu would have answered her question, but it was okay that she didn’t. Because the basic gist of what he would have said- Momoi had the feeling that she already knew what it would have been.

 

Momoi didn’t have a reason to visit Aomine the next day. Until she showed up in front of his building, she hadn’t even known that that had been where she was heading. She’d been in a kind of foggy haze since her adventures with the world’s most dysfunctional couple the night before, worrying about their future, worrying about _her_ future, and generally attempting to process things. When she was in a funk like that, it was sometimes hard to pay attention to the little details.

The reason why she stopped at Kuroko's door on the way up the stairs similarly escaped her. Momoi hadn't yet decided whether or not to be decisive about repairing their fractured relationship. On the one hand, Momoi still blamed Kuroko. Not so much for the way that he had played around with Kagami and Aomine. Kagami may have been right about that, for nowadays when Momoi looked back over Kuroko's initial offense, it seemed a lot more innocent than her panicked mind had at first believed. It wasn't as if Momoi herself had never tried to play matchmaker between two people, after all. Although she had normally done it for less self-interested reasons. 

For trying to change things without her permission, though- Momoi didn't know whether she could forgive him for that. 

These feelings were probably an overreaction. Momoi recognized this. But no matter how crazy they were, they were her _feelings_ , and it wasn't as if she could be free of them so easily. It wasn't as if she could deal with them without some pain.

“ _Why would I make sacrifices for that asshole?”_

Momoi sighed traced a finger down the length of Kuroko's door latch. _Why indeed?_

This had gone on long enough, she realized then. She was mad at Kuroko. Occasionally furious. But the thought of him disappearing from her future, like some new misdirection trick that actually worked on her, made her feel so cold and empty inside that it was like the whole world had disappeared along with him. Like it had been reduced to just an endless data sheet filled with statistics on useless phenomena.

Momoi was wearing the same backpack as she'd had on the previous night during her convenience store raid with Kise. The torn and confetti-like handful of snack wrappers which carpeted the inside compartment convinced her of this fact. And since all of that stuff was still there, there was no reason why that popsicle stick wouldn't be as well.

She found it hiding in a small interior pocket, wrapped like a treasure in a neatly-folded paper napkin. The paper gave her an idea, so she went looking for a pen. She scribbled out a message and, quickly so as not to lose her nerve, slipped the entire package, popsicle stick and all, under Kuroko's door.

_"Meet me at my apartment at the usual time today. It's been a while since we went for a run."_

 

 

For the rest of the day, Momoi fretted at home, trying to predict what would happen when the two of them met (assuming that her initial assumption was correct and that Kuroko would show up in the first place). Kuroko would be even more cagey than ever, of that much she was sure. Momoi had proven herself to be flakey and unstable and not the greatest friend to him, so it might be a while before he opened up to her again. She expected excruciating, exact politeness. She expected Kuroko to say cryptic things, and keep his face blank, and call her Momoi-san.

She hadn’t expected that she wouldn’t even have the door fully open before being enveloped in a tight, desperate hug. She hadn’t expected tired eyes or rough-voiced apologies. And as Momoi staggered backward, too shocked to return Kuroko’s embrace, she almost had to laugh at herself.

_I guess I never have been able to predict Tetsu-kun’s next move,_ she reminded herself, as she finally gave up and relaxed into his arms, hugging him back with reciprocal ferocity. _But I guess if he wasn’t like this, it wouldn’t have taken so long to realize that I've really, actually fallen in love with him._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, KuroMomo is a thing that is happening now. I won't apologize for that, but I will apologize for the fact that this chapter is so weak and draggy that it causes me physical pain x.x


	11. Final Round

It's hard to play basketball when you can't feel your feet.

A couple of weeks or months ago, this sensation would have frustrated Aomine for very different reasons. The way he saw it, since he had gone through all the trouble of taking a break from basketball and suffering through triweekly torture with a physical therapist, he was entitled to legs that functioned properly. He had paid his dues. So once his team's trainer had finally deemed that he was healed and ready to play games, Aomine had assumed that everything would snap back to normal and he would get his life back.

At that time, Aomine hadn't realized that things other than physical injuries could immobilize him too. But here he was, in the middle of a game- a preseason game, yeah, but a semi-important one all the same- holding the ball and just standing there like an idiot as openings to score presented themselves and faded away like waves. 

"Aomine! What the hell, man?" he heard one of his teammates shouting from the bench. "Take it in!"

He dimly perceived their coach shhing him before his attention returned to the game. Or rather... to whatever messed up personal shit that he had been contemplating _instead_ of the game. 

Sometimes you can't feel your feet because you have torn your gastrocnemius. But sometimes, you can't feel them because you're stuck in your own head and no matter how hard you're trying, no matter how much you love basketball, you can't for the life of you find a way out. 

_"Why did you kiss me, that time? When we were, you know..."_

It had taken quite a few one-on-one sessions with Kagami before the redhead had mustered up the courage or whatever to ask him that. Hell, more than quite a few. It had been almost two months now since that Aomine's ill-fated confession to Kuroko, which meant that that night with Kagami... shit, Aomine didn't even _know_ how long ago that must have been. He'd assumed the redhead had forgotten it. Aomine himself hadn't, of course. He still got sweaty just thinking about it, still masturbated, sometimes, to the memory of Kagami pinning him down against his couch, rough hands roaming his body. But that was because Aomine was a complete and utter fuckup that had somehow managed to have a thing for two of his best friends simultaneously. He'd thought that Kagami had just been going with the flow back then, that it hadn’t meant anything to him. But he supposed that he'd been wrong. 

Aomine honestly couldn’t remember how he had answered the redhead’s question, even though it had been asked no more than two days ago. He had the dim impression that he'd tried to brush it away as if the whole event had been meaningless, but considering how flummoxed he'd felt and continued to feel, Aomine doubted whether that had worked as well as he'd hoped it would. 

One of his own teammates came up and stole the ball from him, hissing something angrily as he passed about how Aomine needed to get his head in the game. Aomine got the feeling that he should be mortified by this. But with the way his personal life had been going, he could hardly even feel the sting of embarrassment anymore. He had grown too used to it. 

His team scored and they retreated onto defense. Aomine's mark was some quick-footed little devil that had already scored twice against him, and so he found himself blissfully distracted for the next minute or so as he shut that fucker down. But as soon as there was another break in the action, and Aomine's mind went wandering again.

Kagami was here today. Aomine had seen him during a time-out earlier, sitting with Kuroko and Momoi in the half-court seats that he'd reserved for them. Even if he hadn't known their seat numbers ahead of time, it would have been impossible to miss the flash of bright reds and pale pastels among the sea of normal black-haired people that surrounded them. Momoi was all up in Kuroko’s personal space again, which usually would have annoyed him even though he’d been the one to originally suggest that she do that. But for some reason, today Aomine didn't even _care_. Because Kagami had been looking at him with those serious eyes that he had started to adopt recently around him, those same eyes that he had used to look at Kuroko with, and ever since then Aomine had been entirely unable to concentrate. 

The idea that Kagami might want him as well was completely implausible. Aomine knew this. Aomine had done nothing but antagonize the redhead over the past few months since the onset of their warped and kind of dehumanizing Springtime Cup and, as Momoi made sure to remind him at every opportunity, people who acted like assholes rarely had happy endings. If Aomine couldn't even make Kuroko like him- Kuroko, who he was actually nice to (after a fashion)- there was no way that he had a chance with Kagami. 

But still, a part of him kept on hoping. 

_"You were right, you know. It’s not just that I’m a virgin. That was my first time doing that kind of thing at all. I’d never even kissed anyone before."_

They had been back at his apartment when Kagami had confessed this, nursing cold Pocaris after a game and sitting on the same couch that they’d been on during that night. Kagami’s words had sent a thrill down Aomine’s spine, and he had inevitably imagined pushinghis rival back against the cushions and taking his second time, and his third time...

It was the type of memory that made the present seem like a shithole. But of course that didn’t make sense, because he was finally playing basketball again and how could just sitting around doing nothing with _Bakagami_ seem more appealing than that?

Aomine could sense that that guy from the other team with the stupid-looking bleached hair was about to intercept that pass before the ball was even in the air. With a grunt of exertion, he raced after the culprit, preventing a fast break. He then went in for the dunk. Two points. 

_"Of course I love Tetsuya. That doesn't mean I won't get over him, though. Only idiots keep on being in love with someone after they've been turned down. Or been broken up with, in your case.”_

That guy that Aomine was marking was too darn quick. Not just his feet, but his brain. He always knew just where to pass the ball to keep it out of Aomine's hands. Aomine was no amateur though. He knew that if he could move just a little bit faster, add just a little more power, he could beat this guy. Sweat poured off his body, his breath came in quick bursts, and more than anything Aomine wished that he could just enter the Zone already. At the top of the fourth quarter, his team was losing by more than a few points. Normally that would be his cue to step it up a notch. But he kept on getting distracted by his useless fucking _thoughts_.

_"It's been a while since we've played one-on-one like this. Never thought I'd say it, but it's nice to have you back."_

Heat coursed through Aomine's body at the memory, unrelated to the exertion of dribbling the ball down the court, and some idiot came and blocked him. This impeded his momentum and forced a hasty pass to a teammate behind him, which was quite predictably intercepted. 

"Don't just throw the ball without looking, dumbass!" the same benched teammate as before shouted. This time, the coach didn't bother to silence him.

Aomine was so fucking sick of himself. This was the first game that he'd been allowed to play in since the injury, and he was making a joke out of it. He almost wanted the coach to bench him, just to put him out of his misery, but the man was not so merciful. Being the best player on the court had its downsides. Aomine supposed this was one of them.

It wasn't until he started missing layups that an elementary schooler would have been able to make in their sleep that Aomine truly began to panic. It was an emotion that he was unaccustomed too, and so he reacted to it in a novel way.

_Alright, god. Or basketball god. Or whatever. Let's make a deal...._

Right at that moment their point guard signaled that they would start the "lightning strike" play, and so Aomine had to focus momentarily on blitzing the ball around the court in an overwhelming number of quick passes. This ultimately resulted in a successful shot by one of the guards. They moved back to defense, and Aomine continued his mental bargaining.

_It’s clear that you like torturing me and putting me in awkward situations, and so you know what? I'll give you what you want. I'll talk to Kagami, tell him how freaking obsessed with him I've gotten recently. I've already made an idiot of myself in front of Kuroko this summer; I might as well screw up whatever this thing I've got with Kagami is, too. The more fucked up my life gets the better, right?_

Aomine went for a rebound, failed spectacularly, and looked at the scoreboard. They were 12 points behind now, and only 7 minutes remained in the game.

He swallowed and closed his eyes for a moment, sending a last plea up towards whatever basketball deity that might be listening right then.

_I'll do all of that... but only if we win this game. So let us win, got it?_

He didn't hear a response, and so Aomine would never know for certain whether his prayers had been received. His team did win the game, though, after Aomine brought the score up to a 78-79 in the last five seconds. But even as his teammates crowded in, smacking at his back in enthusiasm and messing with his hair, Aomine couldn't get himself to be happy about it.

_Holy shit,_ he thought as he caught a glimpse of Kagami standing up, his satisfied smile perceptible even from down on the court. _What've I gotten myself into this time?_

 

 

Aomine didn't believe in basketball gods. As far as he knew, _nobody_ did. They just weren't a thing, a thing that people thought existed. But still, the mere idea that they might be out there somewhere and make his career a living hell if he violated a contract with them freaked him out. And so forty-five minutes later, he found himself sitting with his friends in the familiar Maji lunchtime rush, stuffing his face with burgers stolen from Kagami and contemplating loopholes. 

"I still can't believe you beat Miyamoto-sama," Momoi said, almost accusingly. She had ordered a disappointing little salad along with a small carton of fries, and revealed her true colors by starting on the fries first. “I’ve been following his progress since like middle school. He’s a god among men, basically. Not only does he have some of the most impressive stats of any pro athlete in the county, but he’s also a great person. Needless to say, you’ve made a lot of his fans really angry today.”

“Hm. As far as his stats go, I feel that Sapporo’s Hanazawa Kaichi is more than a match for him,” Kuroko commented. He took a polite sip of his customary vanilla shake and waited for her response.

Momoi rolled her eyes. “Well, yeah, if you want to just go with their free-throw percentages or other data out of context, then one might get that impression. But did Hanazawa start a foundation that sends poor kids to college? Does he own a no-kill animal shelter and three adopted Bichon Frisés? One of those dogs is missing a _leg_ , Tetsu-kun. Not just a foot, but an entire _leg._ Miyamoto-sama made a special custom halter for her and has to assist her every time she goes up the stairs, but he loves her anyway and treats her like a princess. You can’t tell me that Hanazawa has that kind of moral fiber.”

“I appreciate dogs as much as the next person, but I fail to see what his kindness towards animals has to do with his basketball skill,” came the blue-haired shadow’s reply.

“Oh come on, Tetsuya,” Kagami said. “You have to admit, that sounds like a guy who’s really got his shit together. He sounds a lot nicer than that asshole who beat him today, at least.”

“Shut up, Bakagami.” Just because Aomine was still staring off into space, trying to think of ways to weasel out of his divine oath, didn’t mean that he didn’t notice when he was being insulted. “If you think Miyamoto’s so great, nothing’s stopping you from hanging out with him instead. Say hi to his dogs from me.”

Kagami bristled. “What kind of cheap shot is that supposed to be? Do you honestly think I’m afraid of an ankle-high dog?”

Aomine shrugged. “Maybe the three of them can merge their bodies into a fierce wild beast. You know, like some kind of mecha thing. Without the mecha.”

“That’s stupid. You’re stupid. Who’d be scared of a wild beast that only has eleven legs?”

“Okay, can we stop saying horrifying and slanderous things about Miyamoto-sama’s furbabies now?” Momoi asked, voice shrill. 

Aomine raised an eyebrow at her, a mocking smile still playing across his lips. He had known that she was a fan of the guy; ever since she’d learned that he would be playing their team, she hadn’t been able to shut up about him for five minutes. But this protective streak was something new for her. Although come to think of it, she was starting to get like that about Kuroko too, sometimes...

She ranted on, unaware of his train of thought. “Jeez, part of me wishes that it had been _his_ team that had won today instead. At least _Miyamoto-sama_ would appreciate the victory, and not just laze around afterwards bad-mouthing his opponents.”

“They weren’t discussing Miyamoto himself,” Kuroko pointed out. “Just his comically tiny dogs.”

“I was talking about you too, Tetsu-kun!” Momoi spat back. “ “Hanazawa Kaichi’, indeed. Hanazawa Kaichi _wishes_ he was at Miyamoto-sama’s level.”

“Maybe Hanazawa-san should get a Bichon Frisé,” Kuroko suggested. “It might warm his heart and encourage him to keep progressing, the way Nigou does for myself and Kagami-kun.”

“Oy! In what universe-”

“Or maybe I could give him some lessons,” Aomine offered, smoothly cutting Kagami off. “Since it seems like the only person who can beat-”

“Not another word, Dai-chan.” Momoi’s tone of voice brooked no argument, and so Aomine didn’t argue. The stupid smirk that always accompanied his former catchphrase remained, however. “You’re insufferable, do you know that?”

“You’re the one who wishes I’d lost!”

Momoi rolled her eyes. “I didn’t say _that._ Obviously I’m happy that you guys won- I know it’s a big step for you, playing a whole game without any help from me at all. All I said was that I wish Miyamoto-sama could have won also.”

“It’s not a game if everybody wins,” Kuroko reminded her.

"And I know that! But still. It would be nice."

They kept eating until a few minutes later, when Kuroko looked down at his watch and announced that it was time for him to go home home and walk Nigou. With a final slurp of his shake, he stood up from the table and collected his drawstring bag. 

Momoi hopped up as well. "Great, I'll go with you! Maybe we can stop and get popsicles while we're walking. Does Nigou like popsicles?"

Aomine grinned a little, waiting for the rain of quiet, well-mannered snark that Kuroko would unleash on Momoi for such a ridiculous question. To his surprise, however, the blue haired boy just smiled at her. "I'm not at all sure. This sounds like something we should test."

"Okay then, it's a date!"

Kuroko looked over at Aomine and Kagami. Ordinarily, this would be the point when he would invite them to come along, a plea for help written clearly in his face. Since there remained at least nine cheeseburgers in a pile between Kagami and himself, Aomine felt that he had as good a reason as any to refuse him, and was all set to do so. But when the time came, there was nothing to refuse. 

"It was nice to see you today, Aomine-kun. Congratulations again on an excellent game," his friend said. "Kagami-kun, I'll see you later tonight."

Kagami's face was stuffed with burger right then, but he managed a little wave as the pair of them left the restaurant. Aomine struggled not to imagine other things that he wanted to stuff Kagami's mouth with. He was already in enough trouble with the putative basketball gods as it was; he didn't want to dig himself into an even deeper hole.

"So, what's going on with those two?" Kagami wondered, once he'd finished swallowing the massive _god damn it Daiki stop stop stop_. "Are they going out now?"

"How should I know?" Aomine said. His forehead creased. "Why, did Tetsu say something?"

"No, he didn't say anything. It’s just that lately they’ve seemed kind of... friendlier. And I know they were fighting a while back, so I thought..."

_Could_ Kuroko and Momoi have started dating? Aomine wondered. He supposed it wasn't impossible. For a moment, he tried to let the idea enrage him, tried to think of Tetsu as a whore and Satsuki as a back-stabbing traitor. But in the end, he just found himself happy that _somebody_ was happy and wondering whether he could get them to name a kid after him. 

Damn. He’d known that Kagami had messed him up, but this was _really_ messed up.

"They've always been friends," he said, proceeding cautiously. "Wouldn't Satsuki have told me, if they were going out?"

"Maybe she thought you'd get mad at her," Kagami said. "I mean, if my best friend started dating the guy that I liked, I know I'd be pretty pissed."

A lump rose in Aomine's throat. He figured that maybe he was eating too fast, and so he put the burger he was holding down on its paper wrapper. 

"I thought you said that you’d gotten over Tetsu." 

Kagami looked over at him, and there was that face again, that stupidly serious expression whose mere memory had just made Aomine play his sloppiest game of basketball since middle school. Aomine was glad that he wasn't holding his burger anymore because he probably would have spazzed and dropped it. "Yeah. I think I have.”

“Seems like it shouldn’t be so easy.” 

For a moment, Kagami kept quiet, regarding Aomine with something like suspicion. Eventually, though, he seemed to interpret this sentence as a sign of understanding rather than as an insult, and he returned to his meal with a shrug. “Yeah, I thought so too. It’s strange. I guess I have you to thank, though. Putting up with your shit has been a pretty good distraction.”

Aomine’s face flushed. That was what he got, he supposed, for trying to have a serious conversation with Kagami.

The once-mighty pile of cheeseburgers was dwindling, and Aomine could feel himself start to freeze up again. It seemed that the effect of the basketball gods was wearing off. If he wanted things to go back to normal, he would have to talk to Kagami soon.

“Last burger’s mine,” Aomine said. He was still a little hungry from the game, and maybe if he ate it really slow, he’d be able to delay the inevitable…

Kagami put a damper on that plan when he reached out and grabbed it anyway. “ _All_ of the burgers were mine, Ahomine,” he reminded him. “Just because I’m generous enough to give you a few doesn’t mean you can take whatever you want. Besides, the last one always tastes the best.”

“That’s why you should let me have it, then. As a symbol of our friendship.”

Kagami laughed as he unwrapped the burger. “Nice try. But I only give burgers to people that are actually nice to me.”

“I can be nice.” Aomine frowned.

“I’d like to see that.”

Kagami started on the burger, and Aomine returned to his contemplations. If he _had_ to tell Kagami how he felt, it would be best to just do it now. They were in a public place, so even if the other boy got mad at him, he would have to tone his reaction down for propriety’s sake. In addition, if Kagami _was_ going to get mad at him… it would probably be best if Aomine ended this now, before he got even more messed up over it. He didn’t want this to be like Kuroko again, where he never got up the courage to tell him how he felt until it was years too late. He didn’t want to hurt like that again, and he supposed, if he had to make up a bunch of elaborate self-deceptions about basketball gods to spur him into action, so be it.

He took in a deep breath. It was now or never.

“Hey, Kagami-”

“There’s something I want to talk to you about, by the way.”

Aomine blinked. He’d been angsting over this confession for months now. Had Kagami seriously just gone and steamrolled it?

“Oh. Me too, actually. But you go first.” 

And for a moment, Aomine thought that he had handled that setback pretty well. But then Kagami opened his stupid mouth again.

“No, you go ahead. What I have to say is kind of…” 

Was Kagami seriously _blushing_? Aomine’s frown deepened. It was hard to tell, since even at his best Kagami’s hair color made his face look weird.

“...well, it’s the kind of thing that’ll end the conversation. So you should say whatever you want to say first.”

A thought crossed Aomine’s mind right then, a thought or possibly a hope- sometimes it’s hard to tell the two apart, when your body’s buzzing like a motor and your mind’s stuck on one track and you’re starting to accumulate evidence that the person currently making you crazy might, just _might,_ have a bit of a thing for you too. 

To put it simply, he found himself intensely interested in what Kagami was about to say.

“No, that’s stupid. If you want to talk to me so much, you should just get talking.”

“But you said you had something-”

“I’m not saying my thing until you say yours.”

Kagami’s frustrated eyes met Aomine’s resolute ones. They just looked at each other for a few moments. And then Kagami chuckled. 

“Okay then. Okay. Seems like we’re at a stalemate again. I guess we both know what has to happen now.”

Aomine didn’t entirely understand what was so funny, at least until Kagami continued. 

“For today’s game, I propose basketball. One-on-one.” Kagami leaned across the table, an eager smile breaking across his face. “Loser has to say it first.”

Heat rushed through Aomine’s body. There was really only one way to interpret that remark, wasn’t there? 

Aomine leaned in to meet him, a matching smile on his face as he appreciated those red eyes, He felt his chest twinge with the knowledge that, by the end of the day, the spark there that had always captivated him would finally be his to claim. “You’re on.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yup, that was the final chapter. I wanted to make it romantic and fluffy, but then I just ended up writing page after page of stupid banter like usual and not explicitly resolving anything. I guess I am what I am x.x
> 
> Thanks so much to everybody who read this far, and an extra special thanks to those who have commented/kudosed/otherwise given feedback. I was a little nervous to post this since I've never written fanfic before, but you all have made it a fun experience, and now I'm definitely hooked!


End file.
